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Without the Web, we would not have found our way to this revolution. And without a graphical browser, we would not have found our way to the Web.

Indeed, Web browsers have altered the way we do many things. And, while this is true of all Web browsers, Mosaic--the first graphical, multiprotocol, multiplatform Web browser, developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and released in 1993--provided the critical conceptual elements that eventually put the Web at the center of our lives.

Before the Web was built, solving a business problem meant identifying the players, finding their phone numbers, calling for literature and waiting for information to arrive. The Web reduced this process to an afternoon of searching for and reading material online. Personal tasks, of course, also have been simplified. New-car shopping, for example, no longer involves going to every dealer in town; with the process turned around, the Web-savvy shopper now collects data online and visits only a selected dealer for a test drive. The Web browser has put a once-unfathomable amount of information into the hands of everyday people, allowing us to gather data and make decisions on our own terms.

In business today, we've gone so far as to readily accept the notion that critical business applications can be delivered by third parties over the Internet via Web browsers. Any prediction of this sort at the outset of the '90s would have been ridiculed, but the flexibility and ubiquity of the browser make the prospect more than reasonable today.

None of this would have happened if Web browsers had remained the simple text viewers they had been in their first-generation releases. This is the real power of the Mosaic story: In supporting multiple document types, platforms and protocols, Mosaic proved that the Internet could become a rich communications medium in its own right.

Mosaic first put graphics onto Web pages, but the idea was near heresy at the time of its introduction. Many of the Internet's self-appointed old guard wailed and gnashed their teeth over Mosaic's graphical nature--to them, it spelled the impending demise of the Internet. Obviously, the much predicted meltdown never happened. Instead, browsers continued to be enhanced to support not only graphics but multimedia.

Similarly, Mosaic's adoption of multiple application protocols within a single viewer enabled users to leverage a variety of technologies and thus access all the Internet had to offer. Web pages, FTP repositories and Gopher menus were the first technologies that most users saw, but today people are using all kinds of protocols to interact with each other over the Internet--through e-mail, instant messaging, secure e-commerce transactions, online games and more.

And it was Mosaic's multiplatform support that demonstrated the universality of the Internet. To this day, it's clear that companies such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems need the Internet more than the Internet needs them.

Mosaic introduced us to the concept of the Internet as a new communications medium waiting to be tapped, whereas previous Web browsers had barely gone beyond offering just another niche technology. And, as networking technology continues to progress in all directions, the graphical browser will become increasingly vital to the way we learn, shop, conduct business, communicate and otherwise go about the mechanics of daily life.