Ten years ago today, the world changed. On April 22, 1993, a group of University of Illinois students released a free piece of software to help people retrieve data more easily from computer networks: the first real Web browser. They called it, appropriately, Mosaic - for it put together the pieces of the online revolution.

The Internet had been around since the 1970s, and Britain's Tim Berners-Lee had created the World Wide Web in 1990, but the software for accessing it was text-based, difficult to use and not terribly interesting. Online content was mostly technical and scholarly data, text and numbers, a resource for academia.

But Mosaic, the first publicly available graphical browser, changed that. It combined text and graphics, making it easier, even fun, for the non-technical user to "surf" through a roiling ocean of data.

About 10,000 people started using Mosaic in April 1993. Today, more than 67 percent of U.S. adults use browsers, as opposed to 9 percent in 1995. More than 580 million people worldwide have online access, a figure that could reach 1 billion by 2005. In June 1993, there were about 130 Web sites. In February 2003, there were more than 38 million.

Then there's the economic impact. Despite the crash of many high-tech firms a couple of years ago, the "dot.com" sector is expected to be worth $6.8 trillion by 2004, according to Forrester Research. Consumers spent $74 billion online last year.

People can do virtually - so to speak - everything on the Web, including many things they shouldn't be doing. It has become a force for freedom and individual empowerment, giving people worldwide a level of access to news and information unthinkable a decade ago. It is a given, such an integral part of our daily lives that we expect to be able to find what we're looking for instantly.

"The most satisfying thing was just seeing how we assembled a couple of building blocks that people could then pick up and do things we never anticipated," Marc Andreessen, who led Mosaic's creation (and later founded Netscape), told Newsweek.

For all its commercialism and dreck, the Web is still a free-wheeling medium where creativity and innovation count - thanks to the browser.