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CED in the History of Media Technology

Although the concept of hyperlinking can be traced as far back as 1945, and was shown by Douglas Engelbart in his seminal 1968 Demonstration, the World Wide Web didn't take off until graphics were integrated with text, and modems became fast enough to transmit the data in a timely fashion. The Mosaic web browser from NCSA was first released in a public beta on September 27, 1993 after having been under development for about a year (principally written by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina). A commercial venture called Mosaic Communications was sprung out of NCSA to market the browser and this company was later named Netscape Communications. The Netscape browser became dominant for a few years, but with the release of Windows 95 on August 24, 1995, the Internet Explorer browser gradually gained ground and eclipsed Netscape prior to the turn of the century.

The above picture shows what the CED Magic  index page looks like in the original beta release of Mosaic. The browser initially only supported left-justified images and text, so the background color and navigation script of the index page are not properly displayed. Development of Mosaic continued for a while after the Netscape spin-off, but was officially halted in January 1997.