The new company set up by James Clark, the founder and former chairman of Silicon Graphics Inc, is Mosaic Communications Corp, formed in Mountain View, California with six programmers that helped to create the Mosaic graphical interface for navigating the Internet at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Mosaic is designed to make it easy for users to find information about specific topics on the Internet’s thousands of databases by applying hypertext technology, which links the separate databases with key words or phrases. Mosaic has been provided free to users of the Internet, and the University of Illinois says that about 250,000 of Mosaic have been downloaded, and as many as 1m people use it. Mosaic Communications plans to develop a commercial version of Mosaic, but Dow Jones & Co reports that many companies are seeking licences to develop commercial versions of Mosaic, or are developing their own copies of the concept, and Illinois has already licensed Spry Inc, Seattle; Santa Cruz Operation Inc and Quarterdeck Office Systems Inc in Santa Monica, and is in negotiations with many others.
Content from our partners
