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The SF Chronicle talks to Marc Andreessen.

Mosaic was originally aimed at scientists who were using the Internet to access supercomputers placed in central locations like Illinois, even though they might be at a campus somewhere else in the world.

Mosaic was going to make it a lot easier for them to exchange information and work collaboratively over these networks. It was funded by the National Science Foundation.

But the Internet community back then, the key technical people, didn’t want the Internet to become easy to use or graphical, because that would pollute the environment. Only smart people could use the Internet, was the theory, so we needed to keep it hard to use.

We fundamentally disagreed with that. We thought it should be easy to use and graphical and you should be able to point and click.

It seemed like an obvious idea. But it was weird, right? Because the computer industry wasn’t taking the Internet seriously. It was viewed as a little academic toy; it certainly wasn’t anything that consumers were going to use.