Now You Don't Have to Be a Geek to Use the Net : But Can These Guys--or Anyone Else--Make a Buck off Mosaic, the Software That Helps Make the Internet Accessible?

By AMY HARMON

Nov. 13, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. —

Jim Clark is late for a meeting, and Marc Andreessen--boy wonder, cyberspace star, author of a computer program that inspired Clark to sink $5 million of his own money into a new company bent on commercializing it--is threatening to strip off his clothes.

“I’ll be there in a moment,” the avuncular Clark keeps saying, a line that--and he appears to know this--only further infuriates the impatient 23-year-old computer geek-cum-vice president. Hailed in recent months as something akin to the Moses of the Internet, Andreessen is still not quite ready to meet venture capitalists all by himself.

They make an odd couple: the well-dressed, 50-year-old founder of Silicon Graphics Inc. and the blond programmer from New Lisbon, Wis., who can be found pounding down Cokes and code at the local Denny’s in the wee hours of the morning.

But Clark and Andreessen are among those at the forefront of a race to bring commerce to the Internet and the Internet to the masses--and they have something of a head start.

You’ve heard of it. The Internet: global jumble of computer networks and repository of informational gems, cutting-edge communication tools and new ways to make money--and all pretty much inaccessible to common mortals doomed to a life without the techno-whiz gene.

But that is changing fast, and mostly because of a program called Mosaic, written by Andreessen and a bunch of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Many of them, it so happens, now work for Clark at Mosaic Communications, the 7-month-old firm he operates out of a suite of offices evenly divided between whiz-kid hackers and neatly suited business types.

Mosaic Netscape, the firm’s first effort at improving on the popular program, has become the buzz of the Internet since its release last month. (Andreessen and his college comrades were forced to sacrifice their preferred nickname “Mozilla,” for the greater good of commercial marketing. “We considered it,” Clark says. “But we just didn’t think it would fly.”)

Indeed, the mass migration of programers from the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications to the corporate world last spring has had more significant hangups as well: the young firm is expected to announce Monday that it is changing its name to Netscape Communications, the result of a tussle over intellectual property rights with the NCSA, which continues to work on improving its own version of the software.

Mosaic allows users to browse through the Internet’s mass of information by clicking on pictures and highlighted text. It displays graphs and maps, plays audio and video (after a fashion) and lets Net surfers follow an idea through a trail of computers across the world, unencumbered by arcane tech-lingo.

Mosaic makes the Internet pretty. It also makes it easy for a normal person to use.

At the same time, the computer language Mosaic is based on--HTML, or hypertext markup language--is so simple that contributing to the Internet has become almost as easy as navigating through it.

Businesses, governments, non-profit organizations and random individuals are plastering the World Wide Web--as the portion of the Internet’s computers that speak HTML is known--with digital data ranging from personal photos to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Such “home pages,” as they are called in Net-talk, are like graphic tables of contents that allow access to selected data at the click of a mouse.) And the number of computers storing such data around the world has multiplied to 10,000 from 100 at the beginning of last year.

Net sociologists predict Mosaic and its clones will soon democratize communication in a way the electronic revolution has always promised but never quite achieved.

And business executives--this is where multimillionaire Clark and his unlikely deputies from Illinois come in--herald the emergence of a new market and a new, inexpensive way to hawk their wares.

“It’s like when the car first came out and you had to crank it, and later someone figured out to put a key ignition in,” says George Brenner, vice president of information services at MCA/Universal, whose “Universal Cyberwalk” Web site went on-line last week. “You don’t even have to know how to type.”

Recent additions to the Web include the Caltrans page (for checking traffic maps), MGM’s Stargate page (clips from the recently released film) and the White House (get a virtual tour, hear Socks meow).

Also: Megadeth, the Burlington Coat Factory Warehouse, Art Crimes (graffiti from the around the world), the complete writings of Nostradamus, Brett’s Page (“Welcome to the Winona (Ryder) archive”) and Romania.

The striking workers at the San Francisco Chronicle post daily editions of the “San Francisco Free Press” on the Web, complete with photographs and a red, white and blue masthead. Chronicle management, meanwhile, publishes its own Web paper.

And on Election Day last week, a Web site set up by the secretary of state and Digital Equipment Corp. to post returns logged nearly half a million “clicks” through its pages, the heaviest traffic the Web has seen since NASA’s computers offered live pictures of comet fragments hitting Jupiter earlier this year.

“Mosaic blew the lid off,” says Clark. “Marc and his team, by doing it, blew the lid off. And suddenly people began to use the Net as a means of disseminating information that is easy to browse. Mosaic is the first step into the future, and you don’t need a broad-band data highway in the sky to get there.”

Clark, who underwent a conversion of sorts after tracking Andreessen down through (what else) his home page at the University of Illinois, hopes to make money off his realization that it is the Internet--rather than as-yet nonexistent “interactive television”--that will be delivering new information, education and entertainment services to Americans in the near term.

“It’s amazing to me that I was so brainwashed,” says Clark, who initially had aimed to get into interactive television when he left Silicon Graphics last year. “Once I allowed myself to step out of that and think more clearly about where markets are today, I thought: ‘This is it. This is where the real market is, so grab the initiative.’ ”

What he did, with help from the elite venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, was grab Andreessen. In a springtime raid on Urbana-Champaign, the duo then recruited five of the seven other members of the core Mosaic team at the federally funded NCSA “They said, ‘Do you want to come work for us for something like five times what you’re making now, be free of the university bureaucracy and finish what you started?’ ” remembers John Mittelhauser, who like most of his colleagues, had hit the top of the university’s undergraduate wage scale at $6.85 an hour. “We said, ‘Yeah.’ ”

Facing an onrush of competitors--dozens of firms are working on spiffier versions of Mosaic--Clark’s company has done what it can to capitalize on the cachet of having the original developers on board.

It’s a tack that has led to more than a little resentment in some quarters.

Critics have charged Mosaic Communications with arrogance for assuming the “Mosaic” name for itself and refusing to license the original code from NCSA. The firm says Netscape was written from scratch, but the sensitive discussions with the university that are prompting the firm to change its name continue. Among the pending issues: copyright infringement and trade secret violations.

“We have an obligation to protect our intellectual property,” says Marcia Rotunda, associate university counsel.

There is also the tendency to confuse the browser program--and the people who wrote it--with the mass of text and images to which it gives access.

“People say that Mosaic is the killer application, but really it has the potential to be the killer app because of what’s underneath it, the World Wide Web,” says Chris Wilson, another member of the original Mosaic team who now works for Spry Inc. on that Seattle firm’s version of the software. “Marc didn’t do that. NCSA didn’t even do that. I’ll do my penance to Tim Berners-Lee and CERN.”

Berners-Lee and a team of high-energy physicists at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, known as CERN from an earlier French name, essentially created the Web in 1989 as a way to communicate with other scientists around the world. But it was not until Mosaic came along that the network became easily accessible to large numbers of computer users.

NCSA’s Mosaic was developed with government funds, and it is distributed free to non-commercial users. For-profit concerns have licensed nearly 10 million copies of Mosaic this year through the university’s designated representative, Spyglass Inc.

Andreessen is quick to acknowledge that his firm is not the only one in the game.

Other commercial versions of the program, such as Spry’s Air Mosaic, are already on the market. Competitors include Spyglass’ Enhanced Mosaic, MCC’s MacWeb, Pipeline and Netcom’s Netcruiser. Both Microsoft and Apple Computer have announced plans to include a Web navigator program in future versions of their basic software.

Clark and Andreessen say they don’t plan to make money on the “client” version of their software, the program that runs on a PC: It was released for free over the Internet last month as part of a gambit to gain market share quickly. But the “server” versions of the software, which commercial organizations use to construct their own Web offerings, sell for $1,500. And a version designed for secure electronic commerce, including credit card transactions--which will go for $5,000 a pop--is due out next month.

On Friday, First Data Corp. said it planned to use the secure version of the Mosaic Communications software to enable its bank customers--including First Interstate Bancorp. to provide on-line credit card authorizations in real time. Microsoft and Visa International announced a similar effort last week. Such services would allow consumers to purchase products via the Net without exposing credit card information to prying electronic eyes.

Mosaic Communications’ success will depend on the evolution of the Internet as a business tool by which companies can communicate with their customers and sell a broad range of products and services.

Dozens of firms are working toward that goal, though for now the commercial activity on the Web amounts mostly to digital brochures: Web postings are a useful way of reaching potential customers who happen to be on the Internet. “Going on line” has also become a status symbol that some companies have leveraged into publicity.

“Look at Pizza Hut,” says Jayne Levin, editor of the Internet Letter, referring to public fascination with the firm’s experiment in taking pizza orders via the Web, announced earlier this year. “And their service only works in the Santa Clara (Calif.) area.”

AT&T;’s futuristic phones can be examined on the Web. Numerous florists offer delivery services. Miller Genuine Draft has set up a “tap room.” General Electric’s plastic products are browse-able, and Fox Television offers program schedules and video clips. The cost is low: Commercial Web sites typically cost a few thousand dollars a month, though homemade home pages can be run off a personal computer and cost almost nothing to maintain.

Still, the audience is small: Only about 2 million Internet fans now have the kind of connection to the network needed to work browser programs such as Mosaic. And depending on the speed of your modem (the device that links your computer to the Net by telephone), it can take an annoyingly long time for images to materialize. Lynx, a more widely used Internet search tool, displays only text.

An ambitious plan for conducting more substantial business on the Net--including publishing, advertising and other functions that might generate revenue--was scuttled recently by Westport, Conn.-based Mecklermedia, after attracting only one customer over several months.

Still, information and entertainment providers such as the San Jose Mercury News (which is working with Clark’s company to develop a news service on the Web), MCA and Viacom hold out hope that the Internet will become a viable business platform. (Viacom, which owns Paramount Pictures, launched its Web site this month with a sneak preview of the soon-to-be released film “Star Trek: Generations.”)

With the advent of secure communications, many expect the Internet to become a major vehicle for buying everything from flowers to fashion. Commercial on-line services such as America Online also aim to fill that role, but Clark and other Internet proponents believe potential cyber-sellers will want to cut out the middlemen and maintain direct contact with customers.

Mosaic Communications, of course, aims to play something of a middleman role itself, helping companies set up their services and possibly taking a small piece of the revenue they generate. Clark is closemouthed about precisely how all this will work, and there don’t appear to be a whole lot of committed customers thus far.

Indeed, despite the hype about business on the Internet, Mosaic’s lasting impact may yet be in opening doors to non-commercial forms of information and communications.

Says Sam Coleman, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who maintains a list of all the California Web sites in his spare time: “The whole network, this whole network culture, has kind of grown up in an ad-hoc way,” Coleman says. “This is true grass-roots stuff here.”

Enter the “universal record locater” address for his page, and the state seal comes up, along with a blue highlighted list of Web sites around California. Click on “Earrings, by Lisa” and you are transported to Poway, where you can choose from pictures of translucent beads and turquoise stones. Another click sends you to a computer in Watsonville, where you can learn all about biplane tours. Surf and weather reports, restaurant guides, the Mt. Wilson Observatory and several high schools throughout the state are also on the list.

Amy Brown, 22, who put up her own home page last summer, says she had 1,700 accesses one day last week, nearly double that of a florist who rents space on the same computer. Her page has links to her friends’ computers in San Francisco and Athens, Ohio, plus other Web sites she thinks are particularly cool.

The Coral Gables, Fla., manicurist says it doesn’t take any real technical skill to construct a home page.

“It’s a reflection of yourself; you get creative,” says Brown, who has received several requests for dates despite her disclaimer that the picture on her home page doesn’t look anything like her. “It’s nice to peer into the life of somebody that you don’t know who lives 8,000 miles away.”

William Scott Proudfoot, a librarian at West Valley College in Saratoga, Calif., recently created a home page so he could share with the world the letters his great-grandfather, a Civil War veteran, sent to Proudfoot’s great-grandmother.

“We thought about giving them to the University of Iowa, but we wanted more general-public type people to see them,” says Proudfoot. Since the beginning of the month, more than 1,600 people have looked at the site, which includes pictures of Newton and Hannah Scott and their obituaries.

From there, a browser can travel to the Library of Congress’ Web site to view more Civil War photographs or to Brian Boyle’s site in New Jersey, where he has compiled a list of other Civil War information available on the Web.

“Is this going to change the world? I don’t know,” says Andreessen, who has grown sensitive to the criticisms of hyperbole about himself and his program: “We’re certainly helping to open things up to a lot of people. Are we changing the world? I don’t know. Well, yeah. I guess we are.”

Now You Don’t Have to Be a Geek to Use the Net : But Can These Guys--or Anyone Else--Make a Buck off Mosaic, the Software That Helps Make the Internet Accessible?

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