8th
NCSA Mosaic on Github
In 1994, when I was in fourth grade, my dad brought me along with him to see a friend of his in the CS department at the University of Buffalo. My dad’s friend, Bill Rapaport, was running NCSA Mosaic on a Sun workstation. I vividly remember the moment he brought up the Louvre’s website and a beautiful full color image of the Mona Lisa was magically beamed across the ocean from Paris, and onto the screen.
My dad had shown me gopher before, but nothing was ever in color. In fact, everything I’d seen about computers up to that point seemed pretty boring.
The moment I saw the Mona Lisa in full color on a computer monitor was one of only a handful of moments that led me to where I am now, which is a state of continual curiosity and wonder about these things, these machines, these computers.
Thanks in great part to the work of others, I was able to pretty easily get Mosaic to compile and run on my machine, and to relive for a moment my childhood renaissance.
What is the Mosaic, the Mona Lisa, that we can show children today?
If you’re on GNU/Linux-Ubuntu (or something else, and you know your way around your package manager) you can compile and run NCSA Mosaic yourself: http://github.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic
