The
history of
Mozilla dates back to 1993 when
Marc Andreessen and
Eric Bina created the first release of
Mosaic, a graphical
browser for the
World Wide Web. The two
undergraduate students from
NCSA at the
University of Illinois created the browser for the
X Window System. Eric Bina handled the lions share of the
coding, and Marc Andressen kept careful watch on the
quality assurance.
After graduating from college, Marc joined forces with Silicon Graphics chairman Jim Clark to form Mosaic Communications to create the Netscape browser. The original plan was to call the product Mosaic, but it was immediately prevented by a threat of a lawsuit from the University of Illinois. The company instead chose the Netscape Communications company name, and the name Mozilla for their web browser.
In October of 1994, Netscape released verson 0.96b of the Mozilla browser. On December 15th, 1994 Netscape released Mozilla 1.0, the first commercial web browser.