5 A Tech Exemplar: Creating Mosaic – the Netscape Navigator Web Browser

Many readers might be more likely to identify authentic learning with twenty-first century tech startups than social work students working in fin de siecle New York as the nineteenth century bled into the twentieth. There is a good reason for that. So, let’s consider another example that is more contemporary and better known; one that provides a template for much contemporary interest in authentic learning.

Consider your internet browser. If you use the Mozilla Firefox browser (or really any browser), you can credit its existence to a group of undergraduate and graduate students who attended the University of Illinois in the early 1990s. By all accounts, this group of students worked in ways that are today considered the norm for many tech startups. In their off hours, independently and aside from their regular mathematics and computer science courses, the Illinois students participated in a faculty-sponsored lab group that soon gathered a momentum of its own. And to realize their ambitions, they had to leave college behind.

This point is critical: the success of these innovative students does not appear to have derived from the faculty. For the faculty, the students’ role was to do tedious, poorly-compensated coding so that the faculty did not have to. In doing that, they would gain valuable, practical experience. But the students aspired to do more than gruntwork. They had higher goals. And they created a free space where they could remake the lab to serve their own ends. The key was the hours the students kept. They often worked overnight and slept during the day. And while they edited code for faculty as underpaid menial workers, they also innovated and invented and recognized opportunities that the faculty, ostensibly there to teach them, could not see.

Time and place matter. Our story takes place in the magic year 1993, when the World Wide Web was in its infancy. Only scientists and a few serious computer hobbyists laboriously surfed the web. And there wasn’t much on it. The students recognized the need for an easier way to navigate and at least one of them saw vast, untapped commercial possibilities in opening the web to the masses. Out of their late night tinkering came what soon became the Navigator browser. When faculty belatedly noticed the value of their work, they tried to rein them in, retake control, and claim the browser as their own. But the students refused to play their appointed role. Instead they bolted for Silicon Valley.

On arrival there, a chance meeting between a venture capitalist and their nominal leader, Marc Andreesen, rocketed them to fortune and fame. Andreessen, from a modest upbringing in a small town in rural Wisconsin, was soon gracing the cover of Time Magazine. At 24 years old, he was the elder of the group and he soon became an icon of high tech entrepreneurship and the commercial possibilities of the internet. Today, he is a Silicon Valley investor worth several billion dollars. There are echoes here of other tech narratives starring other youthful innovators who imagined and built firms that soon ranked among the largest corporations in the world. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Mark Zuckerberg.

Interestingly, in account after account, several themes recur: “drop outs” from universities imagine new products and possibilities and their inventiveness leads them to found new companies. Those new firms evolve novel, flexible, flat organizational cultures that are not only suited to their youthful, nonconforming workforce, but also rely on a self-actuated process that requires coordination. Most importantly, their work produces results that have real world consequences. The work styles they create do more than enable them to have fun: they enable them to attract investors and found and grow companies based on new technologies– companies that soon outcompete established industries in the competition for investors.