http://www.microsoft.com/TechNet/servsup/online/www/tangled.htm (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
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Want to be catapulted out of your desk chair to the New Jersey Institute of Technology's library, or maybe leave the country for a newsboard at the Academy of Sciences in Slovakia...via a single click of your mouse? Quick, easy access to a gold mine of global information is available immediately to even the novice World Wide Web (WWW) user. Developed by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues at the European Particle Physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, WWW uses hypertext and other information retrieval techniques to let users access all types of documents, from strictly academic and computer support-oriented topics to areas of general interest. Many throughout the Internet community feel that WWW will become the tool of choice for future Internet navigation, because it is extremely easy to use, it is flexible, and it provides a uniform interface to many different kinds of services.
If you have toyed with Help files and you are familiar with links and jumps, the Web really won't be all that scary. The Web consists of documents and links, much like a Windows Help file. To follow a link in a document, you click on 'hotspots' with a mouse, or, if you're mouseless, you type the number beside the desired reference. WWW instantly jumps to that reference without the need for you to enter long path names, share names, and so on. Berners-Lee feels that most people simply look at the Web as an Internet navigator, much like Gopher, WAIS or Compass. However, he enthusiastically points out:
The cool thing about WWW is that if the user has an interface which supports hypertext, such as one of the ones for the Macintosh or X11 (X Window/Motif), it can be used to seamlessly represent and link anything which is out there--Gopher menu items, WAIS databases, FTP directories, Usenet News articles or newsgroups...all these things just look like hypertext.
Hypertext is simply a way of organizing and retrieving information. Selected words or phrases act as links to other objects which may present themselves as text, pictures, audio, video, and so forth. Each consecutive document may or may not have additional links, which, if available and selected, plunges you deeper and deeper into a selected resource. Which brings up another interesting point...who can author documents that are placed on the Web and how is it done?
Okay, so you think you have content (i.e., audio, video, text, anything) that other people throughout the world might be interested in using or seeing and you want to use the Web as your means of dissemination. The first item you need is some sort of 'hypermedia' tool, a means to both read and write the hypertext you'll be placing on the web...a browser. Most web clients are basically hypertext readers - typically called browsers. The most functional and sophisticated browser specifically designed to be used with the Web is called Mosaic. Besides presenting hypertext, with its links and other interface niceties like drop-down menus and scroll bars, Mosaic provides the means to view audio and video in your documents. Other browsers may have superior specific functionality; however, the best all-around browser as far as tool availability and ease of use is by far Mosaic. Mosaic can be downloaded for free off of the Internet and there are UNIX, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows versions.
Besides its authoring capabilities, Mosaic has other functionality that makes traveling and using the Web a snap. In the Microsoft Windows version of Mosaic, drop down menus allow users to save and print documents they have located on the Web. There is also an annotation feature, much like the one found in the Browser 2.0 that TechNet uses, which is used with Microsoft Viewer, that allows you to keep specific notes on a document you have found. These notes are stored on your system. When you later decide to re-read your annotated document, Mosaic adds your annotations to the end of the document as a hypertext link. With special software you can even add audio-voice annotations to specific documents or articles of interest!
Navigation is a snap with Mosaic. Two of its great features are:
Once you've fooled around with Mosaic and wandered the Internet for a while you're sure to find some documents or topics that really catch your eye. Eventually you'll find that you tend to gravitate towards specific topics time and time again, whether they are home pages, neat newsboards, or cool servers. To alleviate the problem of constantly clicking and searching for these frequently used items Mosaic uses the idea of a hotlist. A hotlist is a customizable list of topics that are the most insteresting or most used by you. With a single menu selection you can then access any of these 'hotlisted' selections, rather than having to mouse all over the place looking for them.
The Windows version of Mosaic contains a toolbar for easy manuevering within documents. There are also buttons for tasks like forward and backward navigation to documents. Normal Windows functionality, like copying documents or printing, is also provided.
As easy as the Web is to use, it makes sense to lend credibility to the argument that the "World Wide Web is one of the contenders...to be the tool through which Internet users access other Internet front ends, navigators, information services, and resources."
(This section's text was supplied by NCSA Mosaic)
Before you begin your installation, make sure you are using Win32s 1.1.5a. It is available from Microsoft's anonymous ftp server and you can find the file Win32s115a.Zip in the /developer/DEVTOOLS/WIN32SDK directory. For the convenience of our users, we mirror the Win32s software on our ftp site, ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu. You can find the latest version in the /PC/Mosaic directory. The file's name is win32s.zip.
***Remember: If you are using Win32s version 1.1.5 you MUST upgrade to 1.1.5a!
You can obtain Mosaic by ftp'ing it to your machine. If you have never downloaded PC files from NCSA's server, we recommend you read the file README.FIRST now. It provides useful information that may facilitate later steps in the installation process.
mkdir mosaic
cd mosaic
2. Log on to NCSA's Anonymous FTP server and download the NCSA Mosaic files. The address for our server is ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu. At the login prompt enter the name anonymous.
3. At the password prompt enter your email address as the password. For example:
jdoe@business.com
4. Change directories to PC/Mosaic:
cd PC/Mosaic
5. List the contents of the directory, using the command:
ls
6. Tell the server you are going to transfer a binary file by giving the command:
bin
7. Get the Mosaic and the Win32s software using the command:
get wmos20a6.zip
get win32s.zip (if your system doesn't have version 1.1.5a of win32s software)
8. If you need Trumpet winsock, then continue with the following commands:
cd sockets
get winsock.zip
The filename wmos20a6.zip will change with each release and update. It will always be in the format "wmosversion.zip" where "wmos" is short for Windows Mosaic and "version" represents the current version number. For example, wmos20a6.zip is the filename for NCSA Windows Mosaic version 2.0, alpha release 6. The Alpha phase of software development is the primary developing, testing, and debugging phase of this product.
The file wmos20a6.zip is a compressed archive containing the NCSA Mosaic executable and several documents, including this guide and a tutorial when it is available. If you have the latest version of the Pkzip software execute the following command to retrieve the files from the compressed archive:
pkunzip wmos20a6.zip
If you need a copy of the SHAREWARE utility PKWare (zip and unzip), you can find it on our ftp server in the /PC/Mosaic/zip directory. The file, pkz204g.exe, is a self extracting executable file. We recommend you put it in its own directory and just type pkz204g, it will unzip itself. If you have just added pkzip you will need to add this directory to your path definition in your autoexec.bat file.
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Braun, Eric. The Internet Directory. New York: Faucett Columbine, 1994.
Dern, Daniel P. The Internet Guide for New Users. New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1994.
Berners-Lee, Tim. "A Summary of the WorldWideWeb System," ConneXions, Volume 6, No. 7, July 1992.
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