What's New With NCSA Mosaic

What's New With NCSA Mosaic

This document covers recent changes and additions to the universe of information available to Mosaic and the World Wide Web. (See also the Mosaic Demo Document for an organized selection of hypermedia resources and the Internet Resources Meta-Index for a listing of resource guides and searchable databases.)

New resources and interesting additions to existing resources are added to the list as I discover their existence -- send suggestions to whats-new@ncsa.uiuc.edu. If possible, send your suggestion in HTML so that I can simply cut-and-paste it into the master document.


Meta-Announcements

Marc Andreessen is leaving NCSA for Enterprise Integration Technologies of Palo Alto, CA as of January 1994. You can continue to reach him for the time being as marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu; as of January, his email address will be marca@eit.com.

Experimental tutorials on various Mosaic-related topics are now available. Comments welcome (send 'em to marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu).


Announcements

December 28, 1993

Quarterdeck Office Systems, Inc now has a Web server. It is running under MS-DOS and DESQview/X. Of interest: QEMM technotes; ports to DESQview/X (including Mosaic 2.1).

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is now on the Web.

A new Web server at the National Computer Board, Singapore is now online. ORIGINAL works of special interest are:

Michael Fischer, Michael Witbrock, and Michael Meyer have ported the X Windows version of NCSA Mosaic to the Amiga. The official release of Amiga Mosaic has all the information on where to download it, instructions, etc. Please note that this is not an official NCSA product and we do not offer any direct support.

December 26, 1993

A new BLAST Database Search gateway to the NCBI BLAST email server has been set up on the Web.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are pleased to announce a WWW server. This server is maintained by the Division of Computer Research and Technology (DCRT) and contains biomedical information generated at, or pertaining to the the NIH Campus in Bethesda, Maryland. At the present time most of the items accessable from this server are being processed by the NIH Gopher Server. However, this server is still in the development stage and we hope to provide more hypertext specific items in the near future.

As the RFC search in OHIO only shows RFC numbers, and is currently a bit confused anyway, you may want to try this simple but useful RFC Index Search at NEXOR. It only searches the RFC index file, not the full text of the RFCs.

The data of the ceph-genethon-map (Nature paper : "A first-generation physical map of the human genome" D. Cohen, I. Chumakov & J. Weissenbach ) has been made available to the WWW community.

The Tech has made available the text of MIT's press release regarding the settlement between MIT and the U.S. Justice Department in the Overlap Group lawsuit.

Information on the European Physical Society can be found on the WWW server of NIKHEF , the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High-Energy Physics in The Netherlands.

EUnet, the largest commercial Internet service provider in Europe, is now running a Web server. The server provides information about EUnet, including pointers to national EUnet Web servers and various other information sources in Europe. Frequent travellers to Europe should also check EUnet Traveller, the latest addition to the EUnet product family.
EUnet wishes Merry Christmas to all Web users!

The FBI and NASA have been working together to make information on the UNABOM investigation available to the users of the Internet. The information is also accessable via FTP and Gopher.

TNO the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research is on the Web! Our WWW server gives you information about our organization. TNO's primary tasks is to support and assist trade and industry, governments and others in technological innovation and in solving problems. TNO does this by rendering services and transferring knowledge and know-how. Know-how is obtained from TNO's own research, through collaboration with others, or by exchanging or purchasing knowledge. For more information about our organization see also TNO Gopher server or Anonymous FTP server

Internet Distribution Services has moved Document Center, N-Fusion Records, The Directory, and Gymboree to a new permanent server.

Kestrel Institute, a research and development organization located in Palo Alto, California has a new Web server. Their work is in applying knowledge-based formal methods to software engineering problems. Current projects include algorithm synthesis, software testing, reactive systems design and verification, data type refinement, visualization synthesis and high-level specification.

A new Web server is online for L'Institut d'Informatique d'Entreprise du CNAM, France.

December 21, 1993

A new Web server is available at The University of Canberra, Australia.

Here are 2 examples of a general SQL to Mosaic interface : NCSA's supercomputing abstracts and helpdesk . More info here .

Take a hop to what could be the world's first virtual holiday greeting

The The American Astronomical Society now has a World Wide Web server running. It contains information on the Society, meeting schedules, meeting abstracts (in HTML), staff directory and an HTML version of the AAS Job Register.

The Arizona Macintosh Users Group is now on the Web.

The Johns Hopkins University BioInformatics Web Server - a new Web server for biology. Here you will find some interesting biological databases (which have hot links to each other as well as to many other databases around the world), electronic publications for biology, a section to help you with your software needs, and of course links to other Web servers. Among the databases present are:

All of the records in NRL_3D and some of the records in OWL contain in-line images of the 3D structure of the protein and links to the crystal coordinates which can be retrieved an manipulated in your favorite Molecular Graphics Package.

Paul Harrington has written a prototype web-grapher which traverses a _local_ web hierarchy and produces a gif representation together with a ISMAP map.

Norwegian Telecom Research have put the last issue of their technical journal "Telektronikk" online -- a special issue named "cyberspace". It contains 14 articles with more than 100 images. The WEB version beat paper by about one week.

A demonstration home page for the NOAO Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatories' is available.

A WWW-ACEDB gateway has been developed. To use the source for these releases you must have a CGI server (Common Gateway Interface), like NCSA "httpd_1.0".

An incredible forms-based (but not required) archie gateway has been written by Guy Brooker, guy@jw.estec.esa.nl, for CGI compliant servers. It's similar to the ArchiePlex package by Martijn Koster. The package itself can be found here , and a demonstration of its function can be found here. It's a must see.

The summary proceedings of the 1993 Technology Summit, held in the San Francisco Bay Area on November 4-5 1993, are available via the BRIE gopher

The JumpStation is a WWW Form for finding other WWW Pages. At present it is in its Alpha state, and cannot be relied upon too heavily. Problem: The current problem is the search speed (it is SLOW!).

A graphical map of WWW servers in the United Kingdom is now online.

Some interesting references into the MTV WWW server.

Our favorite magazine Wired now is running a Web server.

Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK has a number of Web servers running:

The Agricultural Genome World Wide Web Server is now available. The server mostly contains information related to plant genetics including genetic maps and bibliographic information (the exception is the Animal Genome Program's Newsletter). The information has been collected through funding from the USDA's Plant Genome Program and is a service of the National Agricultural Library.

December 19, 1993

A graphical home page for Portugal is now online.

Lots of new Internet subject guides are online at the Clearinghouse for Subject-Oriented Internet Resource Guides (see also Gopher access).

This is interesting -- a meta-list of "what's new" pages.

Feedback on Pete Deuel's "stretch text" prototype is now online.

A new Web server is online for Department of Computing, Northern Territory University, Australia.

A Web server is running at COSMIC.

An interactive highway construction project locator map is online for the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

In 1849, while constructing the first railroad between Rutland and Burlington, Vermont, workers unearthed the bones of a mysterious animal near the town of Charlotte. These bones proved to be the fossilized remains of a beluga whale. What's a whale doing in Vermont, some 150 miles inland from the sea? Thanks to the University of Vermont's Division of Computing and Information Technology (CIT), you can find out by visiting an electronic museum exhibit entitled Charlotte, The Vermont Whale. Other highlights of UVM's entry into the World Wide Web include the CIT Newsletter, an in-depth guide to the Department of Nutritional Sciences, and links to UVM's InfoCat Campus Infomation Gopher.

Lynx version 2.1 is now available.

The Canadian Federal Government's Communications Research Centre now has a Web server. Interesting things include CBC radio information including online audio for some radio shows, Industry Canada documents, and a Canadian Coat of Arms display.

Information on the PASSWORD project in Europe is now online.

The CDS (Centre de Donnes astronomiques de Strasbourg, France) is opening a public World Wide Web service. The CDS is a data center dedicated to the collection and worldwide distribution of astronomical data. It is located at the Observatoire de Strasbourg, France. The CDS hosts the SIMBAD astronomical database, the world reference database for the identification of astronomical objects. Their Web service gives access to documents and files related to the SIMBAD astronomical database, the TOPBase of the Opacity project, the Star*s Family of directories, etc. It also includes a new feature allowing to select astronomical catalogues by keyword or author's name, among the library of more than 600 catalogues currently available (for a total of about 3 gigabytes of observational data), and to actually retrieve the corresponding files.

Information is online for the College Hockey Computer Rating and for EWHCI, East-West Int'l Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.

A Web server is up at Calvin College.

A Web server is online at University of Hartford.

A new Web server is up at SUNY Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome. One interesting thing is the Sun Workstation Lab interface; it pings all the machines in the lab to see if they respond, and if they do, it gives you a hyperlink for a telnet session. It also shows all the users on each system with appropriate finger hyperlinks.

A new Web server is up at the University of Nottingham.

The University of Tennessee, Office of Research Services, announces its new Web server. The purpose of this server is to provide a package of services to the university research community -- primarily, databases describing funding opportunities, meetings (symposia, conferences, etc.), sponsored activities at The University of Tennessee, interests and areas of expertise of UT faculty, manufacturing companies within Tennessee, access to the Federal Register and Commerce Business Daily publications, federal forms and grant applications, and, of course, the usual 'hooks' to various federal and other resources of interest to academic folk.

A primer converting htbin scripts to CGI scripts is now available for server administrators.

A graphical map of networked information sources in Italy is now online.

The University of Limerick now has a map of Ireland complete with links to all known Irish World Wide Web sites.

Information on a C routine by Kacper Nowicki that may be useful for reading parameters from fill-out forms is now online.

A new Web server is up at KKSF.

A new experimental Web server is running at the Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Canberra. On Enviroserver there are various academic texts to browse, including the "Archidata" collection, a bit of an Honours thesis, a design catalogue, and a hotlist of things that the Faculty might find interesting.

Project Gutenberg, a project aimed at providing copyright-cleared eletronic texts for humans and computers, has released their 100th e-text: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Also of note is their first MIDI file: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, in C-minor. Other recent additions include The Prisoner of Zenda by Anthony Hope, Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. See Frederick Roeber's unofficial Gutenberg Master Index.

December 12, 1993

The Web is getting really really big. Really quickly.

December 11, 1993

The DOS Internet Kit has been updated yet again (by Dean Pentcheff at the Web server on tbone.biol.scarolina.edu) to include new software releases. It is a self-installing package to get PCs connected to Internet resources (including Gopher, Mosaic, Telnet, etc.). It now includes the new Trumpet Winsock #18 (with improved SLIP support), the new Crynwr packet drivers #11, and updated configuration instructions.

The Department of Chemistry at the University of Sheffield is now running an experimental Web server. Its features include WebElements. Currently, WebElements includes a periodic table database, an interactive isotope pattern calculator, and an interactive element percentage calculator. Please note that the server is often switched off during UK night time.

An experimental Web server is running at SUNY Plattsburgh in the Department of Biological Sciences on a Mac Quadra 800.

December 10, 1993

comp.infosystems.announce is a proposed moderated news group for announcements of Internet information tools and services. Announcements may be of the release of new software packages or of new services such as new and updated servers for Gopher, World Wide Web, WAIS and similar information systems. See the call for votes on the creation of the newsgroup.

The English Server at CMU has lots of interesting new things: Cultronix, a new online journal of online culture, a directory of progressive political texts, a MUD for online conversations about humanities interests and other topics of interest to their community, an area for works in Cultural Studies, a collection in issues of gender, sex and sexuality, a recipes collection heavily weighted towards vegetarian items, and a series of informational items on Pittsburgh.

NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS) archives and distributes digital data from past and present NASA planetary missions, astronomical observations, and laboratory measurements. This server provides access to PDS catalogs and on-line systems, the Planetary Science Data Dictionary, and other PDS information.

A new Web server is online at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, in Tokyo, Japan, serving Japanese information. This server contains documents in Japanese, as well as notes on Japanese encoding methods and WWW browsers that can display Japanese.

A Web server is up at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge.

A new Web server is up at Department of Computer Science, Berlin University of Technology.

The first ice hockey team on the Web!

The Australian Public Access Network Association is now running a Web server with contact information, UUCP maps, and pictures of members.

Wilson Lab at Cornell University is now running a Web server which serves information about the high-energy physics program at Wilson Lab, CLEO collaboration preprints, and related information.

The December 2, 1993 issue of the Trincoll Journal --- a student run multimedia magazine --- has just been published.

A HyperDiscordia Web server is up.

A Web server that serves as a gateway to GlobalMUSH, a multi-user interactive environment with a global theme, is now up.

A new Web server is up at QMS.

Researchers at NASA and the University of Houston have implemented a proof-of-concept interface between the Web and their software reuse repository (which is based on a relational database). The interface has been implemented in two modes, with links and with forms.

A Web server is up for the United Kingdom/Canada/Netherlands Joint Astronomy Centre in Hilo, Hawaii. The user guides for the 3.5-metre United Kingdom Infrared Telescope and the 15-metre James Clerk Maxwell Submillimetre Telescope are now online, with other documentation to follow.

A Web page for the rec.windsurfing community is now online. Also, a Web-ification of the alt.folklore.urban FAQ list.

A Web server is coming online for the complete works of William Shakespeare.

The University of Maryland Amateur Radio Association W3EAX is now running a Web server.

Computone Corporation, a leading manufacturer of data communications hardware and software, has put up a Web server. Current product datasheets, software release notes, and updated drivers are on-line.

John December's latest summary of Internet tools for Network Information Retrieval (NIR) and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) is now available. This list gives a one-line description of each tool, a description of its action, and references to documentation and demonstrations through links to ftp sites, telnet sessions, web documents, web-finger gateway, gopher, or news. It also contains pointers to email-accessible resources and reference documents for more information about these tools.

A new Web server is up at the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University.

The Computer Graphics Unit at The University of Manchester provides computer graphics and scientific visualization services. They are now serving information on the Web, including descriptions of graphical software they have developed (much of which is freely available), and graphics research they are doing (which means lots of pretty pictures and several MPEG movies you won't have seen before). Or you could look up the staff there.

International Teletimes, an electronic magazine, is now on the Web.

Carroll College is now running a Web server.

Maintaining this list is a full time job.

December 8, 1993

GNN mirror servers are now available at EUnet in Germany, TU Chemnitz, Universitaetsrechenzentrum, and Ireland Online. Also, if you read GNN but have not yet registered, please do so -- you can use the online registration form with Mosaic 2.0.

December 7, 1993

GYMBOREE is the world leader in age-appropriate parent/child play programs for newborns through 5 year olds. Classes include great fun, music and activities along with Parachute Time for a favorite ending.

The Open Software Foundation now has a Web server. General information about OSF and its Research Institute are available. More stuff will eventually make it there.

The FAQ for alt.fan.blues-brothers is now online.

A graphical Norwegian home page is now online. Anyone with time on his/her hands might want to consider starting a project to do exactly that for the entire world...

A new server is up at Minho University in Portugal.

A Web server is up for NASA press releases.

December 6, 1993

GNN has some new features: an online registration form, an interactive comments form, and more. Also, the December 6 edition of GNN News is out, including stories on mtv.com (the Gopher server, not the mtv.com Web server, for some reason), and more. Also see a new review of Mosaic 2.0.

December 5, 1993

An example of stretch text, as envisioned by Ted Nelson, is online courtesy of Pete Deuel at Clarkson. Pretty funky...

A Travel Resource Center is now online in GNN. It's the first Travel Resource Center on the Internet, and includes links to all kinds of information. It also has a syndicated column called World Travel Watch, and the first (so far as they know) currency rate chart on the net.

A report on Web-related activities at Hypertext '93 is now online at HCC, courtesy Kevin Hughes. Notes on the Web birds-of-a-feather meeting are there, as well as general comments on Web-related demos.

Postmodern Culture, the online journal, now has an official Web server. It is part of the new Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia Web server.

A Web server is online for the Computational Science Education Project, an education project sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Energy. They have developed a textbook for teaching computational science to an interdisciplinary audience of advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. The release of the first version was at Supercomputing '93.

The Swiss node of the European Molecular Biology network (EMBnet) has started a Web server. The server delivers information for the Swiss Molecular Biologist's community. A online information bulletin (Biocomputing News) is available which explains various topics of current interest in Biocomputing.

A new Web server is online at the National Solar Observatory facilities at Sac Peak, in New Mexico. The server has observatory use policies, ftp access, an exhibit, technical documents. In the future, the server will help manage, organize, and present the observatory resources and research.

In addition to the primary Clemson University Web server, there is also a Clemson College of Engineering server.

The first issue of The Directory, the South Bay`s directory of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and supportive businesses is available on the Internet. The Directory is published by the people who bring you OutNOW!, the South Bay's only biweekly newspaper for the lesbian, gay, bisexual community and their friends.

The Applied Research Laboratories of The University of Texas at Austin announces their Web server. It contains mostly internal support information now (including a staff directory), but will likely provide some general laboratory information in the near future.

The University of Tennessee Libraries announces its combined Gopher/Web server. Part of the server is a lighthouse tour.

The Virtual Hospital is now online.

A German Web interface to the simtel archive is now online.

The ARTFL Web server now has a number of new reporting mechanisms. These include limited searches on the main database of 1880 texts, word frequency generators, and morphological analysis.

The Web server at Cambridge Astronomy has been extensively revised, with new home pages for the constituent organisations: the Institute of Astronomy, the Royal Greenwich Observatory, and the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory. New services include Dave Green's Catalogue of Supernova Remnants, and a series of General Astronomy leaflets produced by the Royal Greenwich Observatory.

The Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation Division (NAS) located at NASA Ames Research Center is pleased to announce a Web server containing many technical reports and images (some of which have restricted access). Watch for ongoing improvements.

A Web server is online at Interpath.

A new Web server is running at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. The server includes the first coffee machine on the Web.

A central Web server is running at Texas A&M. Also, the Texas A&M University Hypermedia Research Lab is now on the Web.

The School of Information and Library Studies at the University of Michigan is pleased to announce its first Web server.

Will Sadler at Indiana University School of Law has put online addresses of State and Federal Courts of the United States.

The rec.martial-arts FAQ/pictures repository is now on the Web.

A Climbing Archive is now on the Web.

A Web server is running at Bilkent University.

FreeHEP, a collection of software and information about software useful in high energy physics and related fields, has a new set of hypermedia pages.

The RKBA archive has changed URLs.

A quick FAQ for Mosaic for X 2.0 is now available.

An experimental Web server is running for the AskERIC Electronic Library, a collection of information and pointers to resources of interest to a K-12 education audience.

NTT Basic Research Labs in Japan has made a set of modifications to Mosaic 2.0 to support various national character sets, including Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. See information.

A J.R.R. Tolkien information page is now online at University of Waterloo.


See also:


marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu