[mzi]

Mosaic, the first graphical browser was developed by National Center for Supercomputing Applications. They were of course not bound by dial-up or similar and probably didn't care for commercial offerings of connectivity in their priorities in development.

And before it, slip had been available and standardized for some time.

I would say what drove the adoption of commercial services was the graphical web, not the other way around.

[detourdog]

I think the point I would want to make is the commercial availability of IP addresses drove the graphical browser adoption.

I read about graphical browsers in MacWeek in an article about SoundWire. This was a website that was selling music on the web. I believe fulfillment was through snailmail. There headquarters were in a Brooklyn apartment. I somehow contacted the owner (Joe a friend of Dang) and took the subway to his apartment to see a graphical browser in action. I don't know how long it took to actually get my own IP address but I know it took me a few days to get a MacPPP connection to actually work over slip.

[mzi]

That implies that you got on the bandwagon because it was a graphical web? At my department in Sweden it was an overnight adoption when we found Mosaic.

And I can see you struggle to get PPP to work over slip!

[detourdog]

Prior to the Mosaic I thought Gopher was superior to a text based WWW. Once ISDN became available I used an Ascend Pipeline 50 and that made IP addresses available across an entire network. The office I was working at also immediately adopted Mosaic/Netscape at that time. Getting PPP to work was definitely heavy lifting for me. Getting an IP address as an individual was difficult in the early days.