Netscape Communications Corp - Web Browser Made Internet More Accessible, Involved In Other E-commerce Initiatives, Conflict With Microsoft

Netscape Communications Corp. was co-founded in 1994 by James H. (Jim) Clark and Marc Andreessen. Clark, a former associate professor of computer science at Stanford University, had founded Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) in 1982. Having left SGI earlier in the year, Clark contacted Andreessen with a proposal to start a new company to develop an improved version of Mosaic. Mosaic was a graphical user interface (GUI) for the World Wide Web that integrated text, graphics, and sound. It made the Web accessible to a wide range of users and was responsible for a 10,000-fold increase in Web users over a period of two years. When Mosaic was made available for free over the Internet in 1993, more than 2 million copies were downloaded in the first year.

Andreessen had been part of the team of programmers that developed Mosaic in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he was attending college. Andreessen had recently graduated from college when he was contacted by Clark, and the two decided to combine Andreessen's technical know-how with Clark's business expertise to launch their own company. Established in April 1994 with $4 million in start-up capital from Clark, the company was first called Mosaic Communications Corp. However, NCSA, which held the copyright to the Mosaic software, objected and the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corp. later in the year. Andreessen, then 22 years old, became Netscape's vice president of technology. His job was to make the Web browser Mosaic faster and more interactive. He persuaded several NCSA team members to join him at Netscape, and the company soon released its new browser. While the development team wanted to call it Mozilla, short for Mosaic Killer, the company's marketing executives insisted on calling it Netscape Navigator. Netscape Navigator shipped in December 1994. Jim Barksdale, formerly with AT&T's McCaw Cellular division and Federal Express, was hired as the company's CEO in January 1995.