NCSA – The Future Frontier: Computing on NCSA Mosaic’s 10th Anniversary
On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will host five of the nation’s leading technologists to explore the future of computing and networking. This panel discussion will celebrate the 10th anniversary of NCSA’s release of Mosaic, the world’s first freely available graphical Web browser. Mosaic spurred a revolution in communications, business, education, and entertainment that has had a trillion-dollar impact on the global economy.
I remember seeing Mosaic when I was doing desktop support, and getting my first exposure to the internet, TCP/IP and UNIX. Mosaic was so new but it was obvious and easy to use. A true disruptive technology . . . . as noted here, the industry segment it birthed will be worth 6.8 trillion dollars by 2004.
The growth of the Internet and e-commerce since the early 1990s is like nothing we have ever seen before:
* As of February 2002, 67 percent of American adults 18 or older reported they had access to the Internet or the World Wide Web (source: The Harris Poll). That’s up from 9 percent in 1995 when Harris started tracking the data, an increase of 625 percent.
* ComScore estimates consumers spent $74 billion online shopping in 2002, up 39 percent over 2001.
* A new report by research firm Jupiter Communications (Nasdaq: JPTR) predicts that the total dollars (US$) spent by consumers for online and Web-influenced offline purchases will exceed $831 billion in 2005.
* Ipsos-Reid estimates that 8.5 million new consumers shopped online in 2002.
* Worldwide, the estimated number of Internet users at the end of 2002 was 581 million, expected to grow to 1 billion people by 2005 (Nua.com).
* According to a Netcraft Web Surver Survey (Feb 2003) there are more than 38 million Websites.
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Divisions/PublicAffairs/MosaicHistory/impact.html