[ih] anybody know the history of the group at NCSA that developed Mosaic & HTTPd?

[Miles Fidelman]

Thanks to all who've provided pointers - but, unfortunately, the oral 
and written histories are pretty vague about the NCSA organization & 
players - which is what I'm really trying to uncover.

I'm trying to understand the organizational histories & climates that 
spawned the web - and that involves the managers, not just the workers.  
How we got from public ftp archives, to MIT Techinfo, to gopher, to 
TBL's early web - the organizational motivations/environmnts that led to 
the initial development of each, their promulgation, their eventual 
subsumption by today's web.

A lot of it's pretty well documented, and I have some personal knowledge 
of some of the people & events, but the events at NCSA are less 
visible.  IMHO, if it had not been for Mosaic and the NCSA HTTPd, the 
HTTP/HTML web would have eventually gone the way of gopher, replaced by 
something even newer and shinier. Andreessen, Bina, and McCool took the 
web from laboratory prototype to "industrial strength."  I'd kind of 
like to understand the environment in which that happened.

By analogy.  Licklider set the stage for lots of things - both at BBN, 
and at ARPA - paving the way for lots of things.  We all know the story 
of Ray Tomlinson hacking together the first ARPANET email.  The 
environment at BBN that set the stage - Div. 6, the various 
personalities - are discussed in "Where Hackers Stay up Late" and some 
of the history that Dave Walden has assembled), less is known about the 
next few months, when folks like Ken Pogran implemented mail systems for 
various O/S environments.

Has anybody done this kind of historical treatment of NCSA? (There's a 
timeline on their web site, from their 30th anniversary - but it's all 
kind of sketchy.)

Cheers,

Miles



On 3/10/18 8:38 PM, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
> I see that Marc did an oral history interview as early as 1995:
> http://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/ma1.html
> He seems to have been careful at that time not to be too frank about NCSA management.
>
> Also he was interviewed for this (as well as Vint):
> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/07/internet200807
>
> In fact a Google search for "oral history" "marc andreessen" finds a whole lot.
>
> Regards
>     Brian
>
> On 11/03/2018 13:51, Vint Cerf wrote:
>> you should talk to Marc! The effort was not sanctioned as an NCSA project
>> any more than was the WWW at CERN. It was a kind of skunkworks project that
>> really got a lot of attention when it was released. Jim Clark, then CEO of
>> Silicon Graphics, came to NCSA and persuaded Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina
>> (and others?) to come to Silicon Valley to start Netscape Communications in
>> 1994.
>>
>> vint
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 10, 2018 at 7:17 PM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Folks,
>>>
>>> I'm wondering - does anybody here know the history of the group at NCSA
>>> that spawned Mosaic and httpd - like where it fit on the organization
>>> chart, who ran it, who Andreessen, Bina, and McCool actually worked for?
>>>
>>> I'm trying to understand the environment that spawned the enabled the
>>> folks to take Berners-Lee's basic stuff, and make it ready for prime
>>> time, so to speak.
>>>
>>> Any insights?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Miles Fidelman
>>>
>>> --
>>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>>> In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
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-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra