Spyglass, Inc. was an Internet software company. It was founded in 1990, in Champaign, Illinois, as an offshoot of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and later moved to Naperville, Illinois. Spyglass was created to commercialize and support technologies from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It focused on data visualization tools, such as graphing packages and 3D rendering engines. Spyglass became well known for its version of the Mosaic web browser. The company was acquired by OpenTV in 2000, now part of Kudelski Group, in a $2.5 billion stock swap. Mosaic In May 1994, Spyglass licensed NCSA's Mosaic browser for several million dollars, with the intent to develop their own Web browser. However, NCSA's development effort had resulted in different features, user interfaces, and codebases for each of its major platforms: UNIX, Microsoft Windows, and classic Mac OS. Spyglass therefore created its own Mosaic codebase in which most source code and all features were shared between platforms. Spyglass offered a 30-day trial version for download, but did not actually sell the product to end-users. Instead, it licensed the code to re-sellers that delivered either an unmodified Spyglass Mosaic (e.g., O'Reilly and Associates) or a browser based on the Spyglass codebase (as did CompuServe, IBM and Ipswitch). Among the browsers produced under license using Spyglass Mosaic's codebase was also Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In addition to the major desktop platforms, Spyglass ported Mosaic to other systems including Nintendo 64 for the SharkWire Online system. Browser wars Netscape Communications Corporation, co-founded by Marc Andreessen, released its flagship Netscape Navigator browser in October 1994, and the company soon became the web browser industry leader. Microsoft recognized the potential of the web, and after the company lost out to AOL for BookLink's browser in November 1994, Microsoft reached a licensing deal with Spyglass in January 1995. Mosaic's code became the basis for Internet Explorer, which was released as an add-on to Windows 95 in the Microsoft Plus! software package. Microsoft and Spyglass reached an updated agreement in 1997, following a dispute over Microsoft only paying the minimum amount required for each quarterly royalty. Internet Explorer 6 and older acknowledged Spyglass and NCSA Mosaic in the 'About' panel, but the message was removed starting with Internet Explorer 7 in 2006. Web server technology Spyglass created and marketed a commercially supported web server for Unix and Windows NT, variously called Spyglass Server and Server SDK.