NCSA Celebrates Mosaic Birthday With Symposium Focused on the Technology Mosaic of the Future

released 04.24.03

Contact

Karen Green NCSA Public Information Officer kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu 217.265.0748

CHAMPAIGN, IL  — In 1993, there was no Google or Amazon.com, no MP3s, airline e-tickets or eBay. Then came NCSA's Mosaic Web browser, the first widely popular graphical interface for the brand new World Wide Web.

Within a year, NCSA's website logged more than 1 million downloads of its free Mosaic software and some of the Mosaic developers left NCSA to form Netscape, Inc. By the end of the decade, the World Wide Web was part of our lives and the anchor of a multibillion dollar business sector.

On April 29, the center that helped bring the Web into so many lives will host a symposium that will reflect on the impact of Mosaic and look ahead to the technology breakthroughs that will change our lives in the next decade. The event will be webcast at http://realvideo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/asxfiles/MosaicAnniversary.asx.

"The Future Frontier: Computing on NCSA Mosaic's 10th Anniversary," will feature five of the best known experts in their fields:

• Vinton Cerf is senior vice president of Architecture and Technology at WorldCom and widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet" for co-developing the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.
• Ray Ozzie is founder, chairman and CEO of Groove Networks. Previously, he founded Iris Associates, where he created and led the development of Lotus Notes, the defining groupware product used by more than 100 million people worldwide.
• Dan Reed is director of NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a principal investigator with the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, an effort to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive computing infrastructure for open scientific research.
• Rick Rashid is vice president of research and head of the Microsoft Research Group. Rashid was also a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he co-developed one of the earliest networked computer games, and was director of the CMU Mach Operating System Project.
• David Kuck is an Intel Fellow and director of Intel's KAI Software Lab, a leading provider of performance-oriented compilers and programming tools used in multithreaded applications. Previously, he was a faculty member in the University of Illinois' computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments.

"Mosaic was important because it made the technology of the Web transparent and helped catalyze the build out of the Internet," said Reed. "As a result, more people wanted to use the Web and put up documents. Ultimately, it democratized access to information and gave everyone with a computer their own printing press."

Where will computer technology take us from here? Access to active content, such as information from remote sensors, through grids is one possibility. The integration of embedded computing technology into our lives—from monitors that measure health data to software that tracks the whereabouts of your kids—is another. Many more future scenarios will be discussed at the Mosaic symposium.

For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/MosaicEvent/.

NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.