http://www.xerox.com/PARC/wwwvideo/wwwvideo.html (World Wide Web Directory, ~04/1995)A dramatic change is happening in the world, a change in the way workstations, personal computers, and ultimately people are getting connected.
In the past, networks were thought of as a way personal computers and workstations could be connected to form local area networks, which were further joined to form enterprise networks. These enterprise networks were occasionally linked to allow different groups to share information.
However, over the past few years, organizations and individuals have been rapidly joining together in a single integrated community of networks called the Internet. The Internet has been growing exponentially for the last five years, with the number of machines connected to the network and the amount of network traffic roughly doubling each year.
Today, anyone with a Macintosh, PC, or workstation and a modem can inexpensively connect to the Internet, through a growing number of service providers. Fuelling the growth of the Internet has been the range of information and document services available via the net.
Satellite weather pictures updated hourly, government documents such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, academic papers, engineering diagrams, movie reviews, recipies, and direct customer support, such as Digital Equipment Corporation's "Product and Service Information" are all available from around the world within seconds, merely by clicking on the screen.
That this information can be represented digitally, transferred across a network, and displayed on a computer screen is far from new. But the emergence of standards for the transfer and storage of data has dramatically increased the ease with which individuals can both access and publish this information.
A popular interface to the Internet is Mosaic. Available for workstations, personal computers, and Macintoshes, Mosaic gives direct access to the world wide web of information on the Internet. The workings of the system, such as where data is coming from or what protocol is being used to retrieve it, are invisible to the user; so navigating the Internet becomes quite simple.
In Mosaic, information is displayed in documents. All of the underlined phrases are links to other documents, which can be anyplace in the world. We can follow a link by simply pointing at it, and return to wherever we came from using the "Back" button.
To initially explore the net, we can start with an index of interesting starting points which branch off to the rest of the world's web. We can follow this link to the Honolulu Community College and look at an exhibit of dinosaur fossils. Or we can go instead to Switzerland, where a catalog of information is kept at CERN. From there, we can jump to Japan to look at tourist information.
Mosaic is only one of a number of interfaces people are using today to easily access information from throughout the Internet. it is an important step in the evolution of the Internet as a powerful force changing the way people connect with products, services, information, and each other.
