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A Simple Idea
Marc Andreessen, born in Iowa, 1971, received his BA in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where research was being done at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications on early browsers such as ViolaWWW (created by Pei-Yuan Wei in 1993), based on Tim Berners-Lee's open standards for the World Wide Web.
These earlier browsers had been created to work only on expensive Unix workstations, so Andreessen and a full-time salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating an improved and user-friendlier version with integrated graphics that would work on personal computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic web browser.
After graduating, he teamed up with with Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics, and formed the Mosaic Communications Corporation in Mountain View, California, with Andreessen appointed as a vice-president. The University of Illinois was unhappy with the use of the Mosaic name, so Mosaic Communications changed its name to Netscape Communications, and its flagship web browser was the Netscape Navigator.