Early Browsers
taken from Wikipedia

Mosaic 3.0 for windows
The turning point for the World Wide Web was the introduction [1] of the Mosaic web browser[2] in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 also known as the Gore Bill.[3].
The origins of Mosaic begin in 1992. In November 1992, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) established a website. In December 1992, Andreessen and Eric Bina, students attending UIUC and working at the NCSA, began work on Mosaic. They released an X Window browser in February 1993. It gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia, and the authors’ rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features.
After graduation, Andreessen and Jim Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic Communications Corporation to develop the Mosaic browser commercially. The company changed its name to Netscape in April 1994, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator.
The first Microsoft Windows browser was Cello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since most lawyers had access to Windows but not to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.

[edit] Web organization
In May 1994 the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since. In April CERN had agreed that anyone could use the Web protocol and code royalty-free; this was in part a reaction to the perturbation caused by the University of Minnesota announcing that it would begin charging license fees for its implementation of the Gopher protocol.
In September 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an industry organization, with Tim Berners-Lee as director.

[edit] 1996-1998: Commercialization of the WWW
By 1996 it became obvious to most publicly traded companies that a public Web presence was no longer optional. Though at first people saw mainly the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information, increasing familiarity with two-way communication over the "Web" led to the possibility of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. These concepts in turn intrigued many bright, young, often underemployed people (many of Generation X), who realized that new business models would soon arise based on these possibilities, and wanted to be among the first to profit from these new models.