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Andreessen Horowitz partner Marc Andresseen has been getting a lot of attention in the tech press of late, thanks to his enthusiastic adoption of Twitter since the beginning of the new year.
The latest cool story to come out of his interactions on the site is a piece of insight into the story of the founding of Netscape Communications in the early 1990s.
A developer named Marcos Villacampa tweeted about Mosaic, the web browser Andreessen worked on at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois:
TIL: Mosaic wasn’t exactly a one-man (@pmarca’s) job, had government involved, and it served as codebase for Internet Explorer!
— Marcos Villacampa (@MarkVillacampa) January 12, 2014Andreessen responded with a series of tweets about his time working on Mosaic:
@MarkVillacampa At the start it was Eric Bina (@ebina1) and me. Later expanded to half a dozen killer guys. All but one came to Netscape.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014@MarkVillacampa And yes, Mosaic is original code base for IE, and Netscape is original code base for Firefox.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014@MarkVillacampa NSF grants funded the program for which we all worked. But gov't didn't know about it until it had already happened.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014He then went on to mention that he tried to get another grant to continue his work at the University of Illinois, but was denied. He says that if he had gotten it, he may not have left to found Netscape:
@MarkVillacampa Side note--we later applied for more NSF funding and were denied. If we had received it, may not have left to start company.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) January 12, 2014Here's a better look at the National Science Foundation grant that led to Marc Andreessen founding Netscape:Image may be NSFW.
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