Interesting Historical Factoid for Geeks:
How NCSA Mosaic became Netscape ...

"NCSA Mosaic" was the browser software that popularized the World Wide Web. An updated revision of the same web browser would be released soon thereafter as "Netscape Navigator", which was to quickly become the most popular web browser software in the world (and overtaken by Microsoft's Internet Explorer just as quickly a few short years later).

Netscape's (or Mosaic's) original code was to form the basis for most graphic web browser software in widespread use for years (including Mozilla, Firefox, and all versions of Internet Explorer prior to IE-7, to name just a few).

Mosaic's primary creator was Marc Andreessen, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Andreesen was working on a project at the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he met Eric Bina, a UIUC graduate then employed at NCSA as a programmer. Bina was to become co-author of that first version of Mosaic.

The four links in the two paragraphs above will take you to exhaustive Wikipedia articles about the two browsers and their primary architects, if you're interested.

But here's a factoid that you won't read in Wikipedia, and probably not anywhere else. (This story was told to us by a UIUC Faculty Member when we were working on a marketing project for UIUC's School of Engineering in the late '90's.)

Marc Andreessen had developed three versions of Mosaic while a student at UIUC. The first two versions of Mosaic were released for public use, on license by the University.

(In most instances, the "intellectual property rights" for anything created by a student while attending a particular school belong to the school, and NOT to the student.)

Shortly before his graduation in 1993, Marc approached the Regents of the University, seeking to buy the rights to that third version of Mosaic, telling them that he planned to see if he could somehow find a way to develop it commercially.

The Regents discussed Marc's request amongst themselves and decided "hey, Marc's a nice kid, let's sell him the rights and see what he does with that software." So the Regents sold Marc the rights to that third version of Mosaic for only $500.

In about a year, that third version of Mosaic was renamed Netscape Navigator, which soon became the most widely-used web browser in the world for several years thereafter.

In 1999, America Online acquired Netscape Communications in a stock-for-stock transaction worth an estimated $4.2 BILLION.

Today, Netscape is not used much anymore, Marc Andreessen has gone on to other projects and is a multi-Billionaire.

And the Regents at UIUC are still kicking themselves.