I looked into Marc Andreeson's genius once and it surprised me that there were several GUI web browsers before Mosaic. Marc made a better one at the right time for it to take off. He's a coder, a good one, but to say he's a maverick following his own path is incorrect. It was a no brainer to start Netscape, so that's not so original either.
Q: What were some GUI web browsers before Marc Andreeson wrote Mosaic
A: Before Marc Andreessen and his team developed Mosaic in 1993, there were a few early GUI web browsers:
WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus): Developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in 1990. It was the first web browser with a graphical user interface. (WorldWideWeb on Wikipedia)
ViolaWWW: Created by Pei-Yuan Wei in 1992, it was the first browser to support scripting and stylesheets. (ViolaWWW on Wikipedia)
Erwise: Developed by a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology in 1992, it was the first browser to support inline images. (Erwise on Wikipedia)
Midas: Created by Tony Johnson at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1992, it was another early graphical web browser. (Midas on Wikipedia)
These early browsers paved the way for Mosaic, which became widely popular and laid the foundation for modern web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
I read it. No one is first with anything. There isn't a single thing that someone is first with. Given some thing x, and some \eps, you can find some x_0 that precedes x in time such |x-x_0|<\eps. It's just a matter of looking. That's just how human knowledge is formed. Who can tell, perhaps William Gibson was the originator of the Internet and everyone else just did the highly obvious thing of making it.
Q: What were some GUI web browsers before Marc Andreeson wrote Mosaic
A: Before Marc Andreessen and his team developed Mosaic in 1993, there were a few early GUI web browsers:
WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus): Developed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in 1990. It was the first web browser with a graphical user interface. (WorldWideWeb on Wikipedia)
ViolaWWW: Created by Pei-Yuan Wei in 1992, it was the first browser to support scripting and stylesheets. (ViolaWWW on Wikipedia)
Erwise: Developed by a group of students at Helsinki University of Technology in 1992, it was the first browser to support inline images. (Erwise on Wikipedia)
Midas: Created by Tony Johnson at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in 1992, it was another early graphical web browser. (Midas on Wikipedia)
These early browsers paved the way for Mosaic, which became widely popular and laid the foundation for modern web browsers like Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.