The original user interface for the Web was developed on the Next computer. The Web became popular when Marc Andreessen, graduate student at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign created a new interface for the Web: Mosaic for X. Some people from the Mosaic development team left the university to start their own company, Netscape Communications. Their new browser, Netscape Navigator, has rapidly become more popular than Mosaic. Microsoft has been trying hard to become an important player in the Internet community. Its Internet Explorer is a feature-rich browser which is becoming popular on the PC (Windows) platform. But the Internet Explorer is only available on a few other platforms. We provide some information on several other browsers, so users of platforms for which Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer are not available or not suitable can find a browser that better serves their needs.
The Web relies on the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http) protocol. In order to make information available on the Web, one must have an http server running. Both CERN and NCSA developed offer free servers, which are available through anonymous ftp. (The CERN server can be downloaded from the W3C and no longer from CERN.) Nowadays, the most popular free http server is Apache, which is derived from the NCSA server.
Through the Web browsers one can access information which is not strictly part of the Web: