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

[Jack Haverty]

Hi Miles,

In dissecting "organizational histories ... motivations", it might be
interesting to look at the financial aspects - not only who paid for
what and when, but what benefit did they expect to get in return, wnd when.

It's the old adage - Follow The Money.  IMHO, somewhere along the
timeline from the 60s to today, the climate switched from a largely
technical focus (how can we make this work?) to a largely financial
focus (how can we make money out of this?).  That, IMHO, dictated the
development of what we have today far more than technical merits.

I remember, back in the early 90s, that you had to pay for a license to
use a browser.  That may have been a pivotal historical event, when IIRC
"apps" beforehand had been free to FTP.

/Jack

On 03/12/2018 09:05 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> 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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>