Marc Andreessen (1971-)
Netscape Communications Corp., founded in 1994

"Right now, today, with a little luck and brains and timing, any kid with a computer can do what Netscape has done. There are no barriers to entry anymore. Any kid can spark a revolution."
-- Marc Andreessen

More than just a little luck, brains and timing, it was Marc Andreessen's vision for a user-friendly browser that for a large part had fuelled the growth of the Internet. Knowing the immense amount of information that remained untapped in the World Wide Web, Andreessen set out to write an easy-to-use browser, not for just computer geeks, but for any person on the street. The result is the indispensable Internet browser we now take for granted.

Born July of 1971 in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, Andreessen displayed great precocity in computers. When he was in his fifth grade, he learned Basic programming language from a library book on his own initiative. By grade six, he wrote a virtual calculator which he used to do his math homework. Then his parents made what must be considered one of the great investments in business history when they bought Andreessen his own computer, a Commodore 64. With that machine, he was writing his own games and programmes.

As a teenager, Andreessen was generally considered having a superior and creative intellect. His high school principal states that Andreessen had "an intellectual capacity that could intimidate people." His teachers and classmates remember him having a rather fecund and offbeat imagination; a proclivity to come up with rather different ideas on a variety of subjects such as the nature of God and the future of science.

Andreessen went on to do his undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois. Despite his genius in computers, Marc wanted to pursue a more lucrative career as an electric engineer. "I knew that electrical engineers got paid on average the most in the engineering field. I ended up in computer science largely because it required the least amount of work," he recalled. Strangely, Marc's favourite subjects were English and philosophy; perhaps that explains how he came to see the Internet world as he did, the Netscape way.

The turning point came in 1992 when Andreessen took a $6.85 per hour part-time work at the at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Andreessen was working on an assignment to write three-dimensional visualization software for the Center’s supercomputer when he dreamed up and implemented the first Internet browser.

In the early 1990s, the Internet was very much the insular domain of computer scientists and hackers. Though the Internet contained immense amount of information, "you were still expected to be a rocket scientist to actually access anything," Andreessen recalled.

Andreessen immediately saw the market potential for a user-friendly browser that could be easily set up and installed, that displayed graphics alongside with graphics. In one sleepless weekend in 1993, he created a prototype. Later with his friends and colleagues, they improved into a full-fledge browser which they named Mosaic. With Mosaic, users could navigate the Web by simply pointing and clicking the text and graphics interface. The learning curve for Internet use was thereby shortened from months to minutes. Thus began the transformation of the Internet to a mass medium.

They made the program available free of charge over the Internet, and within a year more than 2 million copies had been download.

Later, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics (SGI), sought out Andreessen to use his browser for an interactive TV for subscribers. However, Andreessen convinced him that Netscape could make much more money by the unlikely strategy of giving away the browser for free, establishing Netscape’s browser (called Netscape Navigator) as the Internet standard, and then selling other kinds of network software for Internet and corporate use.

Quickly, Netscape Navigator secured nearly 75 per cent of the browser market in the mid-90s. In 1995, the company went public that made Andreessen an instant multi-millionaire. As a stellar example of today’s information age entrepreneur, Andreessen has achieved a kind of celebrity status, and has made the cover of Time Magazine as the pre-eminent "super geek" of his generation.

Although, now, Netscape's dominance as a browser has since been ousted by Microsoft's Internet Explorer by its sheer massive resources, Andreessen's legacy remains intact in history as the visionary who gave a tool to millions around the world to partake the Internet revolution. Read my other essays under the Chutzpah series.

Leo Kee Chye

Sunday, March 13, 2005