Eric Bina Profile

Eric Bina (born October 1964) is an American software programmer who is the co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape. In 1993, Bina along with Marc Andreessen authored the first version of Mosaic while working as a programmer at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Eric Bina attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating from there with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science in 1986 and a master’s degree in 1988. He joined NCSA in 1991 as a programmer. There, Bina and Andreessen started working on Mosaic in December 1992 and had a working version by March 1993. Mosaic was posted to the Internet and is famed as the first killer application that popularized the Internet. He is one of the five inaugural inductees to the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the first international conference on the World Wide Web in 1994.

In 1995, Bina and Andreessen were awarded the ACM Software System Award.

In 2010, Bina and Andreessen were inducted into the University of Illinois Engineering Hall of Fame.

Bina co-created, with fellow Internet Hall of Famer Marc Andreessen, the first version of the Mosaic web browser in 1993. Mosaic, a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that worked on a wide variety of computers, played a key role in popularizing the World Wide Web.

Bina and Andreessen later co-founded the Netscape Communications Corporation.  Netscape’s Web browser was also wildly popular; its usage share was over 90 percent by the mid-1990s. Netscape is credited with developing the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Protocol for securing online communication, which is still widely used,as well as JavaScript, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages.

In 2010, Bina and Andreessen received the Association for Computing Machinery’s Software System Award for developing “a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and commercial acceptance.”

Bina attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science in 1986 and a master’s degree in 1988. He joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1991 as a programmer; it was there that he and Andreessen started working on Mosaic.