The Grainger College of Engineering

Eric J. Bina

Eric J. Bina
Eric J. Bina
Co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser that transformed the exchange of information. Co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation, which produced the Netscape Navigator web browser.

Eric J. Bina is a co-creator of Mosaic and Netscape, early web browsers credited with transforming the exchange of information on the Internet.

As an undergraduate student, he worked part-time as an assistant at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and he joined the staff as a programmer in 1991. He collaborated with Marc L. Andreessen to develop the first working version of Mosaic in 1993. Mosaic presented a graphical user interface that allowed pictures to be viewed directly with pages and included several other innovations still seen on browsers today. The free download was an instant success. Mosaic is often credited with popularizing the Internet.

Bina moved to California to follow up on Mosaic development and eventually co-founded Netscape Communications Corporation. In 1994, the company released Netscape, which became the browser of choice for a majority of the Internet community.

In 1995, Bina won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) software systems award for his role in the pioneering developments of the World Wide Web. He is an independent computer software professional.

Degrees

  • BS, Computer Science, 1986
  • MS, Computer Science, 1988