NCSA Mosaic -- September 10, 1993 Demo

Disclaimer: This tour assumes that you have good network connectivity, that you have properly installed Mosaic and appropriate external viewers, and that the various information servers (at NCSA and elsewhere) the document references are alive and functioning well.

Every time you see this icon: you can click on it to hear an audio clip narrating the current topic (if you have a workstation with appropriately configured audio hardware and software).

Welcome to Mosaic from Marc Andreessen at NCSA:

Introduction

• Mosaic is an Internet-based global hypermedia browser that allows you to discover, retrieve, and display documents and data from all over the Internet.
• Mosaic is part of the World Wide Web project, a distributed hypermedia environment originated at CERN and collaborated upon by a large, informal, and international design and development team.
• Mosaic helps you explore a huge and rapidly expanding universe of information and gives you powerful new capabilities for interacting with information.

• Global hypermedia means that information located around the world is interconnected in an environment that allows you to travel through the information by clicking on hyperlinks -- terms, icons, or images in documents that point to other, related documents. Any hyperlink can point to any document anywhere on the Internet.
• For example, here are small images of NCSA Director Larry Smarr and United States Vice President Al Gore:

  

  The small images are hyperlinks to full-size images -- when you click on one of the small images, a full-size image will be pulled over the network and displayed for you.

Exemplary Applications

The examples listed here are meant to be representative, not comprehensive.

U. S. High-Performance Computing and Communications

• A hypermedia exhibit of Scientific Accomplishments at the National Science Foundation HPCC Centers.
• An array of online exhibits from the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
• The National Consortium for High Performance Computing. Included is information about National Consortium activities (including details on NCHPC/DoD collaboration) and a member organizations list.
• The National Science Foundation Metacenter for Computational Science and Engineering.
  • The National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
    • An online hypermedia version of NCSA access, a general-interest magazine focusing on supercomputing applications and NCSA.
    • The NCSA Digital Gallery, an online version of the NCSA Digital Gallery CD.
    • An online hypermedia version of the 1993 About NCSA information packet.
    • A prototype digital library of science done at NCSA.
    • Preprints and technical reports written by NCSA scientists and staff.
  • Cornell Theory Center in Ithaca, New York.
    • An online hypermedia version of CTC's Forefronts newsletter.
    • Information on the Scientist's Workbench.
    • The CTC Data Explorer Repository visual table of contents.
  • Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
  • San Diego Supercomputing Center in San Diego, California.
• A hypermedia exhibit of Army High Performance Computing Research Center research projects.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• A hypermedia exhibit and information on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• A hypermedia exhibit featuring the University of Illinois's Krannert Art Museum.

Arts and Humanities -- Education and Research

• Library of Congress exhibits
  • A hypermedia interface to the Library of Congress's online Vatican Library exhibit. (See also alternate version at UNC.)
  • A hypermedia interface to the Library of Congress's online Soviet Archives exhibit. (See also alternate version at UNC.)
  • A hypermedia interface to the Library of Congress's online 1492: An Ongoing Voyage exhibit.
  • A hypermedia interface to the Library of Congress's online Scrolls From The Dead Sea exhibit.
• Educational materials created by Dr. Michael Greenhalgh, Professor of Art History at Australian National University.
  • A hypermedia exhibit on the history of prints, architecture in the Mediterranean Basin, and more -- art and architecture educational materials featuring very high resolution JPEG images.
  • A major new hypermedia art/architecture history exhibit on The Palace of Diocletian at Split -- A Roman Palace in Ex-Yugoslavia is now online.

Science, Technical, and Professional Information

• Here's the University of Indiana CS Department's unified CS tech report service, featuring thousands of tech reports from dozens (hundreds?) of archive sites on the network. Here's a query on the term parallel (and a somewhat more specific query on the parallel programming toolkit Linda).

  Here is a standalone hypermedia index of University of Indiana CS department technical papers.

• A server designed to show how Mosaic can be used as a front end into a very distributed astronomy image archive is now online at the National Solar Observatory, courtesy Jim Fullton.
• An extensive catalog of astronomical resources on the Internet.
• The Astrophysics Data Facility, part of NASA's National Space Science Data Center, is home of Project STELAR, which provides access to a number of online databases and services of interest to the astronomical community.

  The ANU Bioinformatics hypermedia server, including pointers to the ANU BioGopher and hypermedia introductions to complex systems. See in particular tutorials on cellular automata, L-systems, and fractals and scale, as well as a paper on Landscapes, cataclysms, and population explosions (all of this material is by David G. Green of ANU).

  An molecular biology hypermedia server is now online at Geneva University Hospital and the University of Geneva in Switzerland. The server gives access to several databases (protein sequences, nucleotide sequences, 2D PAGE images, etc.) and includes keyword searches, textual documents and gif images.

  Cornell Law School has the complete US Copyright Act online and in hypertext form, as well as the US Patent Act, the US Lanham (Trademark) Act, and the Uniform Commercial Code. The latter is particularly interesting as the sections of the code itself and the "official comments" are cross-referenced with hyperlinks; here's a sample section of the Code and here's the accompanying "official comment".

Industry, Business, and Publishing

• O'Reilly and Associates' groundbreaking new hypermedia magazine, Global Network Navigator (GNN) (see also alternate link).
• The Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School is serving an example hypermedia version of the NASDAQ Financial Executive Journal. See here for the toplevel interface, here for the cover art, here for an interview with William S. Lerach, a Partner in Milberg, Weiss, Bershad, Hynes & Lerach, etc.
• An experiment in hypermedia publishing: excerpts and audio from a book reading by author Paul Kafka of his novel LOVE Enter.
• A hypermedia interface to Internet Talk Radio. (The more complete NRL-based archive is here.)
• Berkeley Software Design Inc., a small technology company that develops and sells a variant of Unix for personal computers, is serving a wide variety of information on itself, its products, and its technical activities. For example, the company is serving a hypermedia version of the complete documentation set for its BSD/386 operating system for use by current and potential customers alike. Prospective customers can also read all about the lawsuit filed against BSDI by Unix System Laboratories, peruse complete technical specifications and common questions and answers for BSD/386, and even download an order form.
• Another small company, online: A hypermedia server is now running at Morning Star Technologies, a company that makes low-cost connectivity products, like demand-dialed PPP/SLIP for UNIX systems and T1-capable routers.
• A big company, online: Digital Equipment Corporation's hypermedia server.

Other Prototypical Hypermedia Applications

• Sandia National Laboratories. Included is information on the Technology Information Environment for Industry (TIE-IN) program.
• Honolulu Community College, including the incredible, sound-enabled dinosaur exhibit, their campus map, information on SeniorNet and information on faculty and student publications and student organizations.
• There is now a "clickable" plan of the city of Passau, Germany online, as well as a guided tour of Passau during World War II (in German).
• The National Performance Review -- Vice President Al Gore's report on reinventing government -- is online in hypermedia form. (You can also search the plaintext version via WAIS.)
• The St. Olaf College hypermedia server has a hypermedia interface to US State Department Travel Advisories and Consular Information Sheets.
• The MIT AI lab has a hypermedia server here. Included is information on library catalogs and information, computing resources, lots of TeXinfo pages, fun stuff in Boston, and more.

Other Internet Information Resources

• Here's a database of 1993 White House press releases (recent to within about 48 hours) at North Carolina. Here's a query on Socks the cat, and here are queries on the terms Internet and technology transfer.

  Here are all White House releases mentioning Janet Reno, Henry Cisneros, Donna Shalala, David Gergen, Mark Gearan, and Lloyd Bentsen. Here's the President and Vice President's remarks during their February 1993 visit to Silicon Graphics. Here are all the releases that mention Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, and an exhaustive summary of the the Vice President's first 100 days. Here's remarks by the President and Vice President in presenting the National Performance Review, September 7.

• A Gopher server at the University of North Carolina has Bill Clinton's proposed 1993 budget entirely online. First you can read the President's Budget Message and then you can start exploring the budget:

  Budget Authority By Agency

  This document lays out the amount of money the various government agencies have the authority to spend from now through 1998.

  Federal Government Totals

  Here is the breakdown of federal funds across the entire government.

  Federal Programs by Agency

  Here's a breakdown of the money spent by various agencies. For example:

  • DOE Atomic Energy Defense Activities
  • National Aeronautic and Space Administration (Federal funds)
  • DOD's Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation budget.
  • HUD's Housing Programs budget.

  Total Budget Summary

  Here's a summary of overall federal spending.

• The Electronic Newsstand is now online and serving lots of interesting stuff, including the complete text of The New Republic (for example, see VOICE OF AMERICA -- Overhearing the Internet, a recent New Republic article by Robert Wright).
• Here's the National Science Foundation's Gopher server. Here's the September 1993 NSF Bulletin; here's a schedule of NSF Advisory Committee Meetings; here's a summary of the NSF's Electronic Proposal Submission Project.

  Here's the NSF awards WAIS database. Here's queries on that database for the terms parallel and genome; here's an example NSF grant award from that database. Here are awards made to Herbert Edelsbrunner of the UIUC Department of Computer Science; here's the award that established CNIDR.

  Here's the NSF publications database; here's a query on the term NSFnet. Here's the document entitled A Foundation for the 21st Century: A Progressive Framework for the National Science Foundation, a report of the National Science Board Commission on the future of NSF, dated November 20, 1992.

• InterNIC Info Source: A Gopher server run by the InterNIC; this is a good place to find general Internet-related information.
• This machine recently suffered a catastrophic disk crash; it is down for repairs: Here we tie into the UIUC Weather Machine, a Gopher server running at the Department of Atmospheric Sciences. The Weather Machine makes available up-to-the-minute satellite photos, weather forecasts, and computer visualizations of weather phenomena -- for example, here's a computer-enhanced satellite photo of the Eastern seaboard; here's a visualization of temperature, wind direction, and other data for the United States; finally, here's a surface analysis and radar summary for the United States. All of these images are typically updated each hour, automatically, as new National Weather Service data comes in. Finally, here's the current Chicago area forecast.

Some other early web docs you might enjoy:

jonm: "Personally, I have always enjoyed going back to the beginning and reading about the first times that Mosaic got yelled at for violating HTML ( http://www.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-html.1994q4/)..."

robm: I entertain myself at times with the fish picture. http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/info/Scripts.html The demos no longer work, but it's still fun to read.

Archived by totic.org