Ten years ago, Bill Clinton was in the middle of his First Hundred Days. The first signs of the upcoming Flood of 1993 began trickling in. And on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a college student named Marc Andreessen posted a little program. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications was soon deluged with users of the tiny, text-only World Wide Web downloading NCSA Mosaic, “a consistent and easy-to-use hypermedia-based interface into a wide variety of information sources.” Soon after, Andreessen moved to Silicon Valley and created a different browser, Mosaic NetScape, later renamed Netscape, and the modern Internet browser was born.

Ten years later, Silicon Valley has gone from Internet boom to Internet bust, and the Internet as we know it today has become an inextricable part of life for many.

According to a Wall Street Journal article in August 2001, in 1930 seven of ten homes had electricity, about 50 years after the invention of the incandescent bulb.

Also in August 2001, a report on the News Factor Network said the percentage of Americans with Internet access had increased from 39 to 58 percent in two years. In other words, electricity took 50 years to reach 70 percent of homes, but the graphical, post-Defense Department Internet only took eight years to reach 60 percent of people.

Today, the Internet has expanded to include not just the still images first loaded by Mosaic, but audio and video. It’s possible to send those live from another Web site (streaming) or showcase them in a page set up to be a “movie theater.” Items that were previously mentioned only once and then never heard of again now show up in thousands of web logs (or blogs).

With the commercialization of the Internet, a new marketplace for ideas began, but the rest of society inevitably came with it.

A USA Today article Monday detailed an exchange between Andreessen and Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. “At a conference, Berners-Lee yelled at Andreessen, telling him that adding images to the Web was going to bring in a flood of new users who would do things like post photos of nude women.

“‘He was right,’ Andreessen now says with a shrug.”

Ironically, the seedy side of the Internet has also been one of the biggest Internet technology catalysts. Secure credit cards? For porn sites. That streaming video? It wasn’t just for short news reports. And that’s not mentioning the simultaneous rise of Adobe Photoshop and the legion of (mis)uses that come with using it for Web images.

What about Netscape, the little browser that could? It made the mistake of doing two things: Becoming astronomically successful overnight, and creating a new technology Microsoft didn’t control. In mid-May 1995, two years after Netscape took the Web by storm, Bill Gates “suddenly discovered the Internet,” in the words of Jennifer Edstrom and Martin Eller, from the book “Barbarians Led by Bill Gates.”

Within the year, Gates would order Microsoft turned on a dime, shifting focus from operating system to Internet, and declared war on Netscape. Using a program acquired from a company called Spyglass, Microsoft set out to “incorporate” an Internet browser totally (and illegally) into Windows.

Suddenly, Netscape was up against a force it could not really comprehend. It lagged in innovation, figuring only being better than Internet Explorer was good enough, but when Microsoft gives something away free, its competitors have a nasty habit of dying. In mid-1997 Netscape still held 70 percent of the market, but was dropping steadily and rapidly. A deal Microsoft made with Apple to make Internet Explorer the default browser on Macs only hastened the decline.

Two years later, Netscape sold itself to AOL, and has hardly been heard from again. Netscape 6 and 7 are out there today, but do not enjoy widespread use.

The Internet is a far, far different place than it was 10 years. When www.whitehouse.gov first went online in 1993, it was one of only 600 other sites, according to USA Today. In two years, that number had grown to 100,000 sites. By 1999 there were 800 million Web pages, and today there are 3 billion.

And with that the programs have grown as well. Netscape version 1.1 fit on a standard floppy disk. Today, the download of Netscape 7.0.2 takes 19.4 megabytes — about 17 floppies — and that’s for the compressed disk image.

It would be an appropriate adage for Netscape that the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. There is not much financial satisfaction in seeing your company only in the history books, listed today merely as a subsidiary of AOL Time Warner. But in the words of Netscape co-founder Jim Clark, “It was the greatest feeding frenzy of idea creation in the shortest time in history.” And for that every Internet user today can be thankful.