1971-
Father of the Mosaic Browser and Netscape Navigator

Background.

Born 9 July 1971, Marc Andreessen was often referred to as the "boy-wonder" of the new Information Age. The self-proclaimed "media junkie" helped to create a revolution in the way people accessed and shared information. In 1993 Andreessen was a student working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NSCA) in Urbana-Champagne, Illinois, when he created an easy-to-use, point-and-click graphical interface browser for the Web, called Mosaic. (A Web browser is a computer program that retrieves and interprets documents on the World Wide Web.) That same year, he and his coworkers at NCSA released free versions of Mosaic for Windows and Macintosh. By the end of the year the browsers were being downloaded from the NCSA at an average rate of one thousand per day. While the invention of the World Wide Web made the Internet accessible to anyone...