Today in 1994, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications Corporation. Their mission was “to be the premier provider of open software that enables people and companies to exchange information and conduct commerce over the Internet and other global networks.” The company’s first product was a web browser, the Mosaic Netscape 0.9, released on October 13, 1994. This browser was subsequently renamed Netscape Navigator, and the company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation on November 14, 1994, to avoid trademark ownership problems with NCSA, where the initial Netscape employees had previously created the NCSA Mosaic web browser.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (never mentioned in Mosaic’s Who We Are/Our Story section where only “the Internet” is discussed), wrote in Weaving the Web:

Marc [while at NCSA] maintained a near-constant presence on the newsgroups discussing the Web, listening for features people were asking for, what would make browsers easier to use. He would program these into the nascent browser and keep publishing new releases so others could try it. … Marc was not so much interested in just making the program work as in having his browser used by as many people as possible. This was, of course, what the Web needed.

The resulting browser was called Mosaic. … It troubled me in a way that NCSA was always talking about Mosaic, often with hardly a mention of the World Wide Web. Perhaps it was just pure enthusiasm.