Biography of Marc Andreessen
Co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporationwritten by TiaP, Summer of 2003
Marc Andreessen is most famous as the man behind Netscape, the makers of the overwhelmingly popular web browsers Netscape Navigator and Communicator. Andreessen was born in July of 1971 in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, an archetypal Midwestern town of about 1,500 people. His father, a seed salesman, is now retired, and his mother works for catalogue clothier Lands End.
Andreessen showed an early interest in computers, mastering the Basic programming language when he was in fifth grade. At the time he was in sixth grade, he used one of his school computers to write his first program to help him with his math homework. Unfortunately, the program was lost when the janitor turned the power off at the end of the day. In high school, Andreessen was recognized as a superior and creative intellect. The school principal states that Andreesseen had “an intellectual capacity that could intimidate people,” while teachers and classmates remember him as friendly and as having an excellent sense of humor.
After graduating from high school, Andreessen enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in computer science. While pursuing his undergraduate degree, he worked part-time as an assistant at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) when the World Wide Web began to take off. The user-interfaces of available browsers at that time was not user-friendly, so Andreessen decided to develop a browser that was easier to use and more graphically rich. In 1992, Andreessen recruited fellow NCSA employee, Eric Bina, to help with his project. The two undertook their project working nights and weekends in a small basement room and finally they got it complete within about six weeks. The first version of their program called, NCSA Mosaic, which was more sophisticated graphically than other browsers of the time. In early 1993, Mosaic was posted for download on NCSA’s servers. It was immediately popular. Within weeks tens of thousands of people had downloaded the software. By December 1993, Mosaic’s growth was so great that it made the front page of the New York Times business section. The article concluded that Mosaic was perhaps “an application program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch”.
About month later, Andreessen graduated from the university with a BS in computer science and one world-altering accomplishment on his resume. Shortly after the graduation, Andreessen received a fateful e-mail from Jim Clark, the founder of highly successful Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI), that he was interested in starting a technology company with Andreessen. The two decided to build an enhanced and improved version of Mosaic and to follow NSCA’s lead in giving it away in order to establish their product as an Internet standard. In mid-1994, Netscape Communication Corporation was officially incorporated in Mountain View, California. Andreessen and Clark recruited four of the five programmers who had worked with Andreessen at Illinois, and hiring veteran administrator Jim Barksdale to serve as CEO. Andreessen became the Vice President of Technology of the new company.
On August 9, 1995, Netscape made an initial public offering of 10 percent of the company's stock, amounting to 3.5 million shares at an opening price of $28 per share. Within minutes, the price had grown to $74¾ but settled to $58¼ by the end of the day. Even with that decline, Netscape's market value was $2.3 billion.
Andreessen’s meteoric rise to wealth and fame; however, it has seemingly had only minor impact on his lifestyle. Several observers have noted that Andreessen’s wealth has done little to alter the pedestrian taste in cuisine and clothing for which he has become familiar.
Marc Andreessen is a significant person for the Internet, and for the whole computer world. He is a successful man who was named in 1994 as one of the top fifty people under the age of forty by "Time Magazine", and was named "Man of the Year."
Sources:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/andreesen.html
http://www.thocp.net/biographies/andreesen_marc.htm
http://www.duke.edu/~asc8/cps4/who.html
http://www.jboyett.com/gg2ent.htm
Author: TiaP
Created: 18 August 2003