I've worked at NCSA (to one extent or another) for about a decade. It's pretty remarkable to hear (from people who both pre-dated and post-dated the browser work) about the suite of tools being developed around that time. Many had a deep focus on collaboration, but none took off quite as much as Mosaic. A few are harder to find out about -- like the XCMD extension to HyperCard that added support for animations right off the Cray, or Contours, or PalEdit, or Montage for collaborative environments -- and others, like Habanero a few years later ( https://www.hpcwire.com/1999/04/16/ncsa-habanero-hot-java-ba... ) left comparatively bigger footprints.
NCSA tools were a huge thing for those of us who used DOS. In the summer of 1995, I was still using Windows 3.1, and I was the only one who brought a computer to the research program I was enrolled in (not CS). When I told people that they could use telnet to go read their home email, my computer spent an hour a day being the check-in point (it was a long walk to the computer labs on campus, and we didn't have local logins) for those who wanted to read email.
The next summer, I was at the University of Florida, but off-campus. However, the Alachua [County] Freenet offered free dialup with PPP. Since etherppp emulated an Ethernet packet driver, the NCSA apps worked fine there, though obviously much slower.
Better, more complete DOS-compatible suites have arisen since then (e.g., mTCP), but the NCSA suite was fantastic. Security? Nah, none of that. But useful? OMG yes.
I stopped by the Oil Chemistry Building when I was in town a while back, and the day I visited they were tearing down the Fishbowl. I’ve gone places and found things still there. I’ve gone places and found them long gone. I’ve never come back to find a demolition crew working during a holiday week to tear one of my landmarks down.
I was installing ISDN lines in NYC I had various hypercard stacks for doing networking testing. There was a thriving Mac shareware market and HyperCard stacks were one of things I would download with gopher. The internet was full of strange repositories of software tools. I think the term at that time for impossibly connected systems was "toaster net".
