Spyglass, Inc.
| Public | |
| Traded as | SPYG |
| Industry | software |
| Fate | acquired by OpenTV |
| Successor | OpenTV |
| Founded | 1990 |
| Founder | NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign |
| Defunct | 2000 |
| Headquarters | Champaign, USA |
| Products | Internet browser intellectual property |
Spyglass, Inc. (former NASDAQ ticker symbol SPYG), was an Internet software company based in Champaign, Illinois.
The company, founded in 1990, was an offshoot of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and created to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). For several years, it focused on data visualization tools, such as graphing packages and 3D rendering engines. It became most known for its version of the Mosaic web browser.
In May 1994, Spyglass licensed NCSA's Mosaic browser for several million dollars, with the intent to develop their own Web browser. However, NCSA's development effort had resulted in different features, user interfaces, and codebases for each of its major platforms: UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and classic Mac OS. Spyglass therefore created its own Mosaic codebase in which most source code and all features were shared between platforms.
Spyglass offered a 30-day trial version for download, but did not actually sell the product to end-users. Instead, it licensed the code to re-sellers that delivered either an unmodified Spyglass Mosaic (e.g., O'Reilly and Associates) or a browser based on the Spyglass codebase (as did CompuServe, IBM and Ipswitch). Among the browsers produced under license using Spyglass Mosaic's codebase was also Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
In addition to the major desktop platforms, Spyglass ported Mosaic to other systems including Nintendo 64 for the SharkWire Online system.
Netscape Communications Corporation, co-founded by Marc Andreessen, released its flagship Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994, and the company soon became the web browser industry leader. Microsoft recognized the potential of the web, and wanting to get into the browser game as soon as possible, decided to license an existing browser rather than build one from scratch.
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