Mr. Eric J. Bina

The co-creator of Mosaic and the co-founder of Netscape; in 1993, he 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. He 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, he and Marc 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 only five (or six) inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the first international conference on the World Wide Web in 1994. Eric is reported to have been a very skilled programmer during the time that he worked on Mosaic, and possessed a legendary work ethic that is characterized by several 48-hour stints of continuous software development. While there, his unofficial job title (which appeared on his business cards) was "Unsung Hero." In 1995, he and Andreessen were awarded the ACM Software System Award; and in 2010, he and Andreessen were inducted into the University of Illinois Engineering Hall of Fame.