VMS Mosaic is a GUIwebbrowser for use on the OpenVMS operating system[1]. It is the only direct descendent of NCSA Mosaic (the first popular web browser[2]) which is still being actively developed. It is supported on VAX, DEC Alpha and Itanium systems[3]. It is a non-commercial (freeware) browser whose use is covered by various licenses including the original NCSA license.
The current release (V4.2 [4]) supports HTML V4.0, secure connections via OpenSSL, cookies, and various image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, BMP, TGA, TIFF and JPEG 2000. It does not support Java, JavaScript or style sheets.[3]
When NCSA stopped development of NCSA Mosaic at version 2.7b5 in January 1997 [2], several small groups of software developers continued work on Mosaic. Two of the resulting browsers were VMS Mosaic and mMosaic[5]. Although work on mMosaic stopped in 2004, much of its HTML engine has been incorporated into VMS Mosaic. A complete change history starting with NCSA Mosaic for X version 0.5 can be found here.
The first version of NCSA Mosaic ported to VMS was 1.2. The port was done by Bjorn S. Nilsson in the summer of 1993.[6]
