The Mosaic team designed Mosaic with end users as its target.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
The second judge said resolved true; the verdict shown is the first judge's.
What would count as true or false
Judge as of 1995-06. True: contemporaneous or historical accounts show that the NCSA Mosaic team designed Mosaic with ordinary end users as the primary target, for example through ease of use, a graphical interface and inline images, rather than primarily for developers, server operators or researchers. Mostly true: end users were a primary target, alongside other substantial goals. Mixed: end-user focus was one of several equal priorities. Mostly false: accounts show the team mainly targeted technical or academic users, with end users secondary. False: end users were not a design target.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
-
E1 NCSA Web browser ‘Mosaic’ was catalyst for Internet growth University of Illinois News Bureau · 17 April 2003
“When Mosaic made its 1993 debut, it opened up the Internet for nontechnical consumers by simplifying access.”
-
E2 How Web Browsers Have Changed 25 Years After The Introduction Of Mosaic NPR (via WWNO) · 24 April 2018
“That's largely because of an easy-to-use graphical interface called Mosaic developed by a group of students at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.”
-
E3 BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; A Free and Simple Computer Link The New York Times (copy hosted by Larry Smarr) · 8 December 1993
“The problem with Mosaic is that it's currently for the haves of the Internet,”
-
E4 How Netscape Navigator Won and Then Lost the World Wide Web Popular Mechanics · 4 April 2019
“After the Illinois team launched Mosaic, it immediately became the web’s most popular browser because of its user-friendly design.”
Reasoning
Independent accounts describe Mosaic as an easy-to-use graphical interface (E2) with a user-friendly design (E4), and say it opened up the Internet to nontechnical consumers by making access simpler (E1). These are the kinds of end-user features the criteria give as examples. However, these sources mostly describe Mosaic's effect rather than stating what the team set out to target. The 1993 NYT piece (E3) also notes that Mosaic was then mainly available to the "haves" of the Internet. On balance the evidence supports an end-user focus, but it does not show directly that end users were the sole primary design target.
Cite this claim
Marc Andreessen, “The Mosaic team designed Mosaic with end users as its target.” (said June 1995). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_cc6e71eb6292, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_cc6e71eb6292
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
More factual claims by Marc Andreessen
-
Resolved true
“There are 5 billion people on Earth using some version of mobile broadband Internet.”
There are 5 billion people on Earth using some version of mobile broadband Internet.
-
Mostly true
“energy experts say that all carbon-based electrical power generation on the planet could be replaced by a few thousand new zero-emission nuclear reactors, so let’s build those.”
-
Resolved true
“We had the Concord. Now, we don’t even have the Concord.”
Supersonic passenger flight with the Concorde existed previously but no longer exists.
-
Mostly false
“ARPA now known as DARPA funded a military network which was originally conceived as a way to do nuclear command and control in the event of bad things happening in the world.”
ARPA (now DARPA) funded a military network originally conceived for nuclear command and control.
-
Mostly true
“Basically it was well known in 1992 that the internet was for academics and nerds, and there was no use case for ordinary people.”
Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts are made.