It’s History Now

Plaque commemorating the creation of Mosaic web browser by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen, new NCSA building, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.While doing some research for an article I must complete today, I ran across this photo in Wikipedia.  The thing is that I remember this like yesterday, meeting with a tech guy at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) in Raleigh, and his describing what this new World Wide Web tool, Mosaic, would do.  It seemed so fantastic, that I believe that I refused to believe it — something that would be used only among the most hi-tech with the fastest computers — surely not in the K-12.

At any rate, it wasn’t a year before I had it, and was already hearing about Netscape.

3 thoughts on “It’s History Now”

  1. Yes, I remember using the web before graphical browsers – that was pretty much discovery learning and fun at the time and I do remember the prospect of mosaic was pretty incredible to someone used to using a “dos style” internet for email and browsing American university libraries…..

  2. Wow, You brought back a flood of memories. As I looked at the U of I marker and the web browser I want to go back and see if they have a marker for the Plato system at U of I. It was 1975 when Dr. Bitzer told all sitting in the technology integration class that there would be computers in every home by 1985 and I was ready! I remember the magic of that moment. I’m sure I had no idea all the places that would take us. But it was not so different from the moment I had today with a young middle school teacher. She was feeling overwhelmed as she worked on integrating multimedia projects in her math classroom. When I asked why she kept working on the projects, she quickly smiled and said, “it’s because my kids keep saying ,wow, this is great! and they’re talking about math.”
    And so even in 1975 that magic moment was because I knew my middle school kids would say, WOW! and learning was going to be exciting!

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