Tag Archives: Mosaic

Internet Explorer’s Swan Song

It’s been a long time. A very long time. Back in the halcyon days of the Web, circa early ’90s, we had the early browsers such as Lynx (a text-based browser that predates the graphical front-end of the Web, and you can see what current websites look like as text-only at this page), along with NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator.

At that time, Bill Gates felt the Internet was only a fad and didn’t put much thought into a browser. But it didn’t take long for him to realize that he might be wrong. Very wrong. When he realized it was the future, he wrote that memo that turned the entirety of Microsoft towards integrating with the potential of the Internet.