Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee Brendan Eich created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages and a founding engineer of Netscape Lou Montulli created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.
NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web. Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window. It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise, and ViolaWWW.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is a state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances research, science and engineering based in the United States. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and provides high-performance computing resources to researchers across the country. Support for NCSA comes from the National Science Foundation, the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, business and industry partners, and other federal agencies.
The University of Illinois System is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Illinois consisting of three universities: Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign. Across its three universities, the University of Illinois System enrolls more than 94,000 students. It had an operating budget of $7.18 billion in 2021.
NCSA HTTPd is an early, now discontinued, web server originally developed at the NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign by Robert McCool and others. First released in 1993, it was among the earliest web servers developed, following Tim Berners-Lee's CERN httpd, Tony Sanders' Plexus server, and some others. It was for some time the natural counterpart to the Mosaic web browser in the client–server World Wide Web. It also introduced the Common Gateway Interface, allowing for the creation of dynamic websites.
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites and an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net-worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. It is the flagship institution of the University of Illinois system and was established in 1867. With over 53,000 students, the University of Illinois is one of the largest public universities by enrollment in the United States.
Spyglass, Inc. was an Internet software company. It was founded in 1990, in Champaign, Illinois, as an offshoot of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and later moved to Naperville, Illinois. Spyglass was created to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It focused on data visualization tools, such as graphing packages and 3D rendering engines.
Donna J. Cox is an American artist and scientist, Michael Aiken Endowed Chair; Professor of Art + Design; Director, Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC); Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); and Director, edream. She is a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization, specifically cinematic scientific visualization.
The World Wide Web is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
Wen-mei Hwu is the Walter J. Sanders III-AMD Endowed Chair professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is on compiler design, computer architecture, computer microarchitecture, and parallel processing. He is a principal investigator for the petascale Blue Waters supercomputer, is co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center (UPCRC), and is principal investigator for the first NVIDIA CUDA Center of Excellence at UIUC. At the Illinois Coordinated Science Lab, Hwu leads the IMPACT Research Group and is director of the OpenIMPACT project – which has delivered new compiler and computer architecture technologies to the computer industry since 1987. From 1997 to 1999, Hwu served as the chairman of the Computer Engineering Program at Illinois. Since 2009, Hwu has served as chief technology officer at MulticoreWare Inc., leading the development of compiler tools for heterogeneous platforms. The OpenCL compilers developed by his team at MulticoreWare are based on the LLVM framework and have been deployed by leading semiconductor companies. In 2020, Hwu retired after serving 33 years in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Currently, Hwu is a Senior Distinguished Research Scientist at Nvidia Research and Emeritus Professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Jon E. Mittelhauser is a software executive who co-wrote the Windows version of NCSA Mosaic and was a founder of Netscape.
William Douglas Gropp is the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. He is also the founding Director of the Parallel Computing Institute. Gropp helped to create the Message Passing Interface, also known as MPI, and the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation, also known as PETSc.
The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".
Robert Martin McCool, more commonly known as Rob McCool, is a software developer and architect.
Ping Fu is a Chinese-American entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of 3D software development company Geomagic, and was its chief executive officer until February 2013 when the company was acquired by 3D Systems Inc. As of March 2014, she is the Vice President and Chief Entrepreneur Officer at 3D Systems. Fu grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and moved to the United States in 1984. She co-founded Geomagic in 1997 with her then-husband Herbert Edelsbrunner, and has been recognized for her achievements with the company through a number of awards, including being named Inc. magazine's 2005 "Entrepreneur of the Year". In 2013, she published her memoir, Bend, Not Break, co-authored with MeiMei Fox.
The University of Illinois Department of Computer Science is the academic department encompassing the discipline of computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. According to U.S. News & World Report, both its undergraduate and graduate programs rank in the top five among American universities, and according to Computer Science Open Rankings, the department ranks equally high in placing Ph.D. students in tenure-track positions at top universities and winning best paper awards. The department also ranks in the top two among all universities for faculty submissions to reputable journals and academic conferences, as determined by CSRankings.org. From before its official founding in 1964 to today, the department's faculty members and alumni have contributed to projects including the ORDVAC, PLATO, Mosaic, JavaScript and LLVM, and have founded companies including Siebel Systems, Netscape, Mozilla, PayPal, Yelp, YouTube, and Malwarebytes.
Rob A. Rutenbar is an American academic noted for contributions to software tools that automate analog integrated circuit design, and custom hardware platforms for high-performance automatic speech recognition. He is Senior Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Pittsburgh, where he leads the university's strategic and operational vision for research and innovation.
NCSA Brown Dog is a research project to develop a method for easily accessing historic research data stored in order to maintain the long-term viability of large bodies of scientific research. It is supported by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) that is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
