| Chapter 1: | The World Wide Web: A General Introduction |
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By the end of 1992, there were 50 Web servers around the world (Cailliau cited in Gromov, 2002). The load on the first Web server rose steadily by a factor of 10 each year between 1991 and 1994 (Berners-Lee, 1999).
Academia and industry were also taking notice of the Web. Programmers around the world began to enrich the browsers and port the World Wide Web program to other platforms. The Erwise, Midas, Viola, and Cello browsers came on the scene. In early 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released its “browser” called Mosaic. This was an important development in the history of the World Wide Web because Mosaic permitted color images as part of the Web pages and links. It was also designed to run on most workstations and personal computers and was distributed free of charge over the Internet by NCSA. During the first month of its availability on the Internet (November 1993), 40,000 copies were downloaded; by spring 1994, a million or more copies were estimated to be in use. The Web started to spread at a phenomenal rate. By May 1994, there were over 1,200 Web servers in the world (Abbate, 1999).
The main developers of the Mosaic system, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, later left NCSA and developed a commercial version of the browser called Netscape. This browser, which was released in 1994, had a simplified and friendly user interface, increased speed, and additional security measures to support financial transactions (Abbate, 1999). Microsoft’s Internet Explorer appeared in 1995.