Likewise, you could find boxed versions of Netscape in retail stores at some point selling for $40 per copy.įor all practical purposes, at the time Navigator was the only publicly available web browser, so it enjoyed a period of virtually zero competition. 'Netscape is the first Internet tool that lets the average user with a 14.4 kb modem work with the Internet interactively'Ĭommercial users were supposed to purchase licenses of the browser at $99 per user, which included warranty and customer support, but that didn't last long. 'By making Netscape available free to individuals for personal use, the company builds on the tradition of software products for the Internet being offered free of charge.' read the 1994 press release. Navigator was made available for free to individual, academic and research users.

In December, they renamed the company Netscape Communications and launched version 1.0 of Netscape Navigator.Īs true visionaries, Netscape founders understood that the web browser would become a revolutionary tool and set a crucial precedent. By October 1994, the team had released Mosaic Netscape 0.9. Likewise, Andreessen tapped several of his colleagues from the NCSA to work for the company. Andreessen had worked on the project while he was with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.Ĭlark, who had previously worked at Silicon Graphics, brought with him several of his co-workers to work on Mosaic. Mosaic was the name of a software that allowed users to access different content on the web. In April 1994, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded the Mosaic Communications Corporation. All of those previously separate systems were connected, but the world needed a way to 'browse' them-a 'web browser' was in order. The internet changed drastically with the advent of the World Wide Web. These systems were disparate and had to be dialed into separately. To most, it would be unrecognizable, primarily consisting of bulletin board systems with no multimedia aside from a few low-res inline images. Back in the early days, the internet was a much different creature than it is today.

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