Microsoft Corp chairman and CEO Bill Gates has now figured out exactly when it was that he came up with the idea of combining the browser with the operating system – the technological issue at the heart of the US government’s antitrust case against his company: April 5 1994, which just happens to be two days before the incorporation of Netscape Communications Corp. Gates, recalling the events of that year to the Seattle Times, said the decision was made an a Microsoft executive retreat at Shumway Mansion in Kirkland, Washington. He went on to tell the paper that an April 16 memo assigned executives to draw up plans for a browser and Microsoft’s web site. Netscape co-founder Jim Clark says he and the other co-founder Marc Andreessen first began talking about forming a company on March 1 of that year, the day after Clark left Silicon Graphics Inc – a company he had founded 11 years earlier – and at that time he had no idea of Microsoft’s internet plans. However, doesn’t the fact that the Mosaic browsers, developed at Andreessen’s alma mater, the University of Illinois, on which Navigator was based was already available and being used by 1993? Mosaic Communications Corp one of the earlier monikers of Netscape, which, unlike Spyglass Inc, never actually got a license from the University of Illinois for its version of Mosaic and went on to develop Navigator without one, basing its work on that done at the university’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Ironically, Spyglass went on to license its technology to Microsoft to form the basis of – you’ve guessed it – Internet Explorer. Make of that what you will.
