1) 25 years ago around this time, Worlds first GUI based web browser was released, MOSAIC.

2) It was a radical step forward for the web, which was at that point, a rather dull experience. It took the boring "document" layout of your standard web page and transformed it into something much more visually exciting, like a magazine.

3) NCSA, University of Illinois, where Marc Andreessen developed Mosaic claimed it was their property as it was developed on their premises & blamed Marc for stealing all of its resources.

4) Marc & his team had to build the browser again from scratch. When they released their first beta, University of Illinois cried foul & accused them of trademark infringement. They had to pay 3 million dollars to make UOI shut their mouth. Mosaic got renamed to Netscape.

5) Netscape began to license their browser to corporations. This was the start of the dot-com boom. They did an IPO & was immediately valued at 2 billion dollars. Marc made $58 million dollars.

6) Microsoft didn’t see this coming. Netscape had it all. Nearly 80% of the market.

7) NCSA subsequently licensed the Mosaic technology to Microsoft for their upcoming browser; Internet Explorer. They went ahead and violated every sense of business ethics practices to crush the competition. They bundled the browser with their operating system, Windows 95.

8) Microsoft forced their business partners, One of them being Compaq into canceling any affiliation with Netscape. They threatened that if Compaq doesn’t do that, they’ll cancel their OS license.

9) Microsoft was shipping 200 million copies of their OS every year so it became a life & death situation for Netscape.

10) In 1998, Antitrust lawsuit was filed against Microsoft, one of the biggest in american history.

11) In Nov 1998, AOL aquired Netscape in an all stock deal for $4.2 Billion. Marc went on to become the CTO.

12) Internet Explorer was just created as a bomb to destroy Netscape. When you have 95% of the market and you stop innovating; guess what; the web stops innovating. And you can see how much they cared about their browser when they released IE6.

13) Netscape had been snuffed out and with no significant competition, they disbanded the IE team and left only a skeleton crew. In the early 2000's, the web went into almost a 5-year dark age because of this.

14) Fortunately, the open-source code from Netscape became a basis for a new browser, Firefox. Firefox went on to rip a hole in IE's pocket. The rest is history.

15) 25 years later. Marc is still leading the tech race. Not sure what Microsoft is up to.