Years ago, starting in 1989, i worked at SoftQuad Inc. in Toronto. I got there because SoftQuad sold a text formatter based on troff (sqtroff). But they also sold an SGML structured editor, Author/Editor.
I was at a conference, ACM SIGIR, on information retrieval; I’d written a text retrieval package that was moderately popular at the time, lq-text.
In the last afternoon i got a call from the office saying I had to leave the conference early and go to support a sales effort somewhere or other. So I was ready to leave for the airport when there was an announcement.
We interrupt the schedule for this conference because an important program has been released, NCSA Mosaic, and its authors, two graduate students, are here to demonstrate it.
So I got to see Eric Bina and Marc Andreesen demonstrate Mosaic, the first cross-platform graphical Web browser.
I went back to the office afterwards, and what I’d seen changed the company.
