UNITED STATES. — The first version of the now ubiquitous Internet Explorer browser was launched on August 16, 1995.
A revised version of the Spyglass Mosaic browser, which had been licensed from Spyglass Inc., integrated with the Windows 95 platform and, coming after the original Mosaic browser, it offered a seamless Web browsing experience for the novice and experienced user alike.
The first Internet Explorer was derived from Spyglass Mosaic. The original Mosaic came from NCSA, but since NCSA was a public entity, it relied on Spyglass as its commercial licensing partner.
Spyglass in turn, delivered two versions of the Mosaic browser to Microsoft, one wholly based on the NCSA source code, and another engineered from scratch but conceptually modelled on the NCSA browser.
Internet Explorer was initially built using the Spyglass, not the NCSA source code.
