Anil Karmel’s first brush with celebrity happened early on in his undergrad days at Illinois — even if there was no way for the future C2 Labs CEO to know it at the time.
“I was walking through the DCL one day on my way to a class when someone called out and asked me to try some code out at home, He handed me a three-and-a-half-inch floppy with handwriting on it describing the software contained therein.
“I took the floppy back to my apartment on Fifth and Bash Court and installed the software on my home-built Intel i486 DX2 desktop. I typed www.uiuc.edu into NCSA Mosaic, the world’s first web browser. I perused the simple site and pondered the implications that this new paradigm represented — a giant leap beyond the Bulletin Board Systems I’d frequented up to that point.
“The individual that handed me the floppy was none other than Marc Andreessen, co-author of NCSA Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape.
“Man, I wish I kept that floppy.”
