Netscape's bankers first planned to sell its stock for about $14 a share. Demand pushed the price to $28, and on its first morning of trading in August 1995 it opened at $71. The company was 16 months old and had never made a profit. Its product was Navigator, a web browser built by 24-year-old Marc Andreessen and a team from the University of Illinois. Many people date the dot-com boom to that one day.

Mosaic Moves West

As a student, Andreessen co-wrote Mosaic, a browser that put pictures and links on the same page. Jim Clark, who had founded Silicon Graphics, flew to meet him, and in April 1994 the two started Mosaic Communications in Mountain View. A name dispute with the university turned it into Netscape. The bet was that the web would become the way people used computers. Navigator was free to try, and within a year most web users ran it.

The Browser War

Netscape priced at $28 a share on August 8, 1995, and closed its first day at $58.25 on Nasdaq. Microsoft answered with Internet Explorer and bundled it free with Windows. Netscape's share of the browser market shrank year by year. In 1998 it released its source code, the seed of the Mozilla project and later Firefox. AOL bought Netscape in a stock deal valued at $4.2 billion when it was announced, and the purchase closed in 1999.

Cover: Calendar print: sailboat, Mount Fuji, and sunrise, Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a sailboat at sunrise (a navigator on a new horizon).