Introduction to Mosaic Communications Corp.
Marc Andreessen
The following is a brief overview of the new company that's been
formed by Jim Clark and yours truly around the nucleus of Mosaic.
Also, anyone with solid experience in this whole area (you know who
you are :-) interested in joining the company in the near future,
please drop me a note.
Cheers,
Marc
Mosaic Communications Corporation
Corporate Synopsis
------------------
Mosaic Communications Corporation, based in Mountain View, California,
is a new technology company that intends to provide software and services
to companies and consumers for commercial activities on the Internet.
The company's co-founders are:
* Dr. James Clark, founder and former Chairman of Silicon Graphics.
* Marc Andreessen, originator of Mosaic.
Mosaic Communication Company's core technical staff consists of:
* Virtually the entire core Mosaic technology development team from
the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- Eric Bina,
Chris Houck, Rob McCool, Jon Mittelhauser, and Aleks Totic -- as well as
Lou Montulli, author of Lynx.
* A number of top-notch engineers from Silicon Graphics.
Mosaic is a state-of-the-art Internet-based hypermedia information system
that has recently taken the computer world by storm. In the year since its
release, it has acquired a global user base of about 2 million people and has
been widely hailed as the "killer application" of the Internet and of data
networks in general. Mosaic was developed at NCSA by the core staff of
Mosaic Communications Corp. and has until now only been available in
unsupported, non-commercial-grade form.
Mosaic Communications Corp. intends to do the following:
* Provide consulting and support to companies that want to use the
Internet and Mosaic to serve information, interact with customers, or
improve efficiency and productivity.
* Provide support to companies currently using Mosaic as a tool for
accessing information, communicating with customers, or tying together
workgroups.
* Run an Internet information server complex -- a "cyberspace mall"
-- to support hypermedia information distribution and interactive
transactions on behalf of companies and organizations that lease space on
the server.
* Develop, deploy, and widely license a next-generation, commercial-
grade Mosaic client, server, and authoring suite.
Mosaic Communications Corp. believes that the Internet is in a fundamental
transformation into the broadband consumer-oriented information
superhighway of the future. We intend to support companies and
consumers throughout this transition and to grow into a significant force in
network-based information and entertainment by the end of the decade.
Contact Information
-------------------
Mosaic Communications Corp.
650 Castro Street, Suite 500
Mountain View, CA 94041
Phone: (415) 254-1900
Fax: (415) 254-0239
Email: ma...@netcom.com (temporary)
Related Press Coverage
----------------------
* "Silicon Graphics' Clark Sets Up Firm To Provide Internet
Operating System", Wall Street Journal, G. Christian Hill, May 9 1994.
* "New Venture in Cyberspace by Silicon Graphics Founder", New
York Times, John Markoff, May 7 1994, p 17.
* "New firm is built on visions of youth: Silicon Graphics founder
hires 22-year-old in key role for Mosaic", San Jose Mercury News, David
Bank, May 6 1994, p 1F.
* "A Free and Simple Computer Link", New York Times, John
Markoff, December 8 1993, p C1.
* "The Internet And Your Business", Fortune, Rick Tetzeli, March 7
1994, p 86.
* "Mosaic: A useful tool to help you navigate the Internet" (1993
InfoWorld Industry Achievement award), InfoWorld, Bob Metcalfe, March
28 1994.
* "Building The Data Highway", Byte, Andy Reinhardt, March 1994,
p 46.
* "The Information Future: Out Of Control (And it's a good thing,
too.)", New York Times Magazine, James Gleick, May 1 1994, p 54.
* "Mosaic CyberMalls", Internet Business Journal, Michael
Strangelove, April 1994, p 16.
--
Marc Andreessen
Mosaic Communications Corp.
Mountain View, CA
ma...@netcom.com
Can You Say Puyallup?
> Mosaic Communications Corporation, based in Mountain View, California,
> is a new technology company that intends to provide software and services
> to companies and consumers for commercial activities on the Internet.
Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
suddenly smiled upon? It sounds very much like you know what you're doing,
but I can't say I've ever seen an Internet server dedicated to the commercial
aspects of electronic communication (short of Compu$erve, and that doesn't
really count). Mind explaining where the loophole lies?
LAiRD
--
|_T|\| \\ ljne...@unix.amherst.edu
L|| | // laird j. nelson / 3:4 quartet
Marc Andreessen
(Can You Say Puyallup?) writes:
Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
suddenly smiled upon?
Actually, in general, yes.
Cheers,
Marc
Simon E Spero
Can You Say Puyallup? <ljne...@unix.amherst.edu> wrote:
>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
>
>Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
>suddenly smiled upon? It sounds very much like you know what you're doing,
There are no rules on commercial use of the Internet, for the simple reason
that there are no rules at all on the Internet. Various carriers may implement
Acceptable Use Policies for their own customers, but that's pretty rare
nowadays.
Simon
--
Tar Heel Information Services - Nothing but Net | Welcome to TCP JAM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have heard the routers pinging, each to each. | Tel: +1-919-962-9107,
I do not think that they will ping to me- | Fax: +1-919-962-5604
Stewart Clamen
Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.www,comp.infosystems,alt.hypertext
From: ma...@netcom13.netcom.com (Marc Andreessen)
Organization: NETCOM On-line services
Date: Mon, 9 May 1994 20:19:00 GMT
Hello from Mountain View,
The following is a brief overview of the new company that's been
formed by Jim Clark and yours truly around the nucleus of Mosaic.
Well, I guess we now have the answer to the question I asked following
the December NYT feature, about how the NCSA Mosaic folks would deal
with all their new-found attention.
I wish you the best of luck with your endeavour.
--
Stewart M. Clamen Internet: cla...@cs.cmu.edu
School of Computer Science UUCP: uunet!"cla...@cs.cmu.edu"
Carnegie Mellon University Phone: +1 412 268 2145
5000 Forbes Avenue Fax: +1 412 681 5739
Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891, USA (I accept MIME,HTML,Hyperbole,PGP)
Claude Boucher
>the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- Eric Bina,
>Chris Houck, Rob McCool, Jon Mittelhauser, and Aleks Totic -- as well as
>Lou Montulli, author of Lynx.
> * A number of top-notch engineers from Silicon Graphics.
...
> * Develop, deploy, and widely license a next-generation, commercial-
>grade Mosaic client, server, and authoring suite.
...
>Mosaic Communications Corp. believes that the Internet is in a fundamental
>transformation into the broadband consumer-oriented information
>superhighway of the future. We intend to support companies and
>consumers throughout this transition and to grow into a significant force in
>network-based information and entertainment by the end of the decade.
Pardon me, if I may sound a little blunt, but... what does it means, as far as
NCSA's version 2.0 of Mac Mosaic?
Claude Boucher
Communications NB
Fredericton, NB, Canada
Todd Postma
: ...[stuff deleted]...
: Mosaic Communications Corporation
: Corporate Synopsis
: ...[stuff deleted]...
Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be priced
out of my (and many other's) reach. Why is it that great ventures which
grow partly because of their great availability suddenly get perverted into
money making ventures? First there is talk of charging for Internet access
based on bandwidth (instead of fixed connect rates) because commercial companies
are going to control access (instead of Merit/NSF). Then comes Motif which
started charging for X functionality (that now has become ~standard.) And now I
find that the WWW is about to go commercial.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support Marc et. al.'s right to do what they
have done. It just saddens me that felt they had to do it. Thank goodness
for GNU - without them, the UNIX world would still be tiny and overpriced.
-Todd-
(The above is all my opinion, so treat it as such.)
--- __ __ __ __
__/\_\ Todd A. Postma / // /_/ GSI/GSR - Computational Neutronics /\_\__
/\_\/_/ UC Berkeley /_//_ /_/ Department of Nuclear Engineering \/_/\_\
\/_/\_\ Sys Admin - Advanced Nuclear Engineering Computing Laboratory /\_\/_/
\/_/ GE d-@ p+ c+++ !l u+++ e+++ m+ s+++/+ !n h f+ !g w-- t+ r- y? \/_/
Marc Andreessen
great availability suddenly get perverted into money making
ventures?
Because we live in a free-enterprise system where government-funded
research and development is at least partially intended to be an
incubation method for technologies that then become commercially
distributed and supported products. It's the natural course of
events, not a "perversion".
Cheers,
Marc
Brian Behlendorf
Simon E Spero <s...@tipper.oit.unc.edu> wrote:
>In article <2qmcpj$q...@amhux3.amherst.edu>,
>Can You Say Puyallup? <ljne...@unix.amherst.edu> wrote:
>>Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
>>suddenly smiled upon? It sounds very much like you know what you're doing,
>
>There are no rules on commercial use of the Internet, for the simple reason
>that there are no rules at all on the Internet. Various carriers may implement
>Acceptable Use Policies for their own customers, but that's pretty rare
>nowadays.
Or, if for the simple reason that most of the internet is "commercial"
these days anyways (what, you think AT&T, Sprint, and MCI are
providing backbone service as charity? :)
Brian
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"They that can give up essential liberty to # br...@wired.com
obtain a little temporary safety deserve # bbe...@sfraves.stanford.edu
neither liberty nor safety" - Ben Franklin # http://www.wired.com/
Thomas Dettmer
> Why is it that great ventures which grow partly because of their
> great availability suddenly get perverted into money making
> ventures?
>
>Because we live in a free-enterprise system where government-funded
>research and development is at least partially intended to be an
>incubation method for technologies that then become commercially
>distributed and supported products. It's the natural course of
>events, not a "perversion".
>
product support. Would you like to continue work, if nobody pays for it?
(I know there are few exceptions, but in general...)
tom.
--
det...@ls1.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
phone: +49-231 755 6464, FAX: +49-231 755 6555
T. Dettmer, Dortmund University, Computer Science I, 44221 Dortmund, Germany
Budi Rahardjo
2. Re: commercialism on the Internet. I have no problem with
companies providing services on the internet. For example they
could run WWW servers and make their services/new product available
on their servers. As long as they don't start sending junk e-mail or
junk Usenet posts. (i.e. the user MUST make an effort to get the
info and know what s/he is getting into).
Example of this is the Sun's home page.
3. Re: Mosaic becomes a commercial product.
I also don't have a problem with this. Some people (company) needs
support from "real company". (It's kinda tough to get the mgmt to
write a cheque out to an unknown person, easier to write to
a company. I guess).
Although, IMHO, Marc et al. should provide a free version of Mosaic.
Otherwise, grassroot programmers will come up with a GNU version :-)
[don't take this lightly.]
Also this is a good PR on their part. [``we have thousand Internet
sites running our product''. It sounds good, right ?]
best wishes.
-- budi
--
Budi Rahardjo <Budi_R...@UManitoba.Ca>
#include <std-disclaimer.h>
Unix Support - Computer Services - University of Manitoba
Marc VanHeyningen
>1. Congrats for the new company.
Likewise...
>3. Re: Mosaic becomes a commercial product.
> I also don't have a problem with this. Some people (company) needs
> support from "real company". (It's kinda tough to get the mgmt to
> write a cheque out to an unknown person, easier to write to
> a company. I guess).
Indeed, I'm sure that the existence of (presumably) high-quality
commercial software for doing Web stuff should increase the stability
and the marketability.
> Although, IMHO, Marc et al. should provide a free version of Mosaic.
> Otherwise, grassroot programmers will come up with a GNU version :-)
> [don't take this lightly.]
This is silly. There are *already* a lot of other WWW clients, some
of which are covered by the GPL (and some of which are arguably
technically superior to Mosaic in some ways.) For that matter, NCSA
Mosaic was never exactly gfree. I suppose people could get more
explicit about it and come up with a browser called Wham (WHam Ain't
Mosaic.)
One would suspect that it would behoove CommerceNet to try to put the
financial burden mainly on advertisers and make the client dirt cheap
in order to increase the potential market, but it depends on a lot of
things, not the least of which is the degree to which their products
interoperate with others. I hope/would like to expect that the
temptation to make a system closed to prevent other software, free or
not, from muscling in will be foregone in favor of interoperability;
Marc Andressen is not Bill Gates (right?)
One hopes this will increase innovation; customers who are paying good
money will presumably expect things like announced timetables of
expected features (like HTML+ and form support) and fiddly bugs to get
fixed.
Is NCSA going to continue supporting their Web products? Will they
hire new people to continue development, or kind of just let it coast?
Either way, it seems reasonable to assume that new innovations won't
come from there for some time; this is OK, and might even cause some
people to buy a clue and realize there are other clients out there.
--
<A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/mvanheyn.html">Marc VanHeyningen</A>
HALLAM-BAKER Phillip
In article <2qn8gk$l...@agate.berkeley.edu>, tapostma@fission (Todd Postma) writes:
|>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
|>: ...[stuff deleted]...
|>: Mosaic Communications Corporation
|>: Corporate Synopsis
|>: ...[stuff deleted]...
|>
|>Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
|>the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
|>by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be priced
|>out of my (and many other's) reach. Why is it that great ventures which
|>grow partly because of their great availability suddenly get perverted into
|>money making ventures? First there is talk of charging for Internet access
|>based on bandwidth (instead of fixed connect rates) because commercial companies
|>are going to control access (instead of Merit/NSF). Then comes Motif which
|>started charging for X functionality (that now has become ~standard.) And now I
|>find that the WWW is about to go commercial.
WWW has been commercial for a long time. All that is happening is the Mosaic
team are joining the commercial sector.
|>Don't get me wrong, I fully support Marc et. al.'s right to do what they
|>have done. It just saddens me that felt they had to do it. Thank goodness
|>for GNU - without them, the UNIX world would still be tiny and overpriced.
I don't think this is a bad move at all for the Web, NCSA-Mosaic was developed
in prototype fashion - it works but the spec was developed with the application.
I am willing to bet that there is an awful lot of stuff in there that Marc and
co would like to change, there always is. Going from academic grade to
commercial grade is a lot of work but its also very necessary for a lot of
people to have commercial grade stuff. Those that need it will be able to get
hold of a robust, bullet proof bet-your-business-on-it browser (editor?).
There will still be browsers in the public domain, the CERN libwww that Mosaic
is built on is public domain. There are at least two top line X11 browsers
on the stocks for HTML+, one even has editing. There is tkWWW which if people
are willing to put in the effort could be made into a front runner. There is
no shortage on the browser front. What there is a shortage of is information to
browse.
A lot of people are going to be making a lot of money out of this area. Why
shouldn't it be the people who started it?
There are a lot of companies who are asking how to apply the Web to their
business. I don't see why if they are willing to pay the people who developed
the technology shouldn't charge them.
The other point is that in the commercial world you tend to have rather
plesanter customers than in the PD area. I thought at the time of the row
when some people demanded Marc and co rewrite Mosaic for tk-tcl that if
I was him I'd have been very pissed off with the tone of peoples requests.
Of course the internet is going to become an industry. At the moment only a
tiny minority have access to the internet. less than 0.25% of the population.
Of those the majority only have a connection at work. To put a connection into
every home will cost a lot of money. Somewhere that cash has to be found.
--
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker
Not Speaking for anyone else.
Eric Lease Morgan
>:-(
Eric Lease Morgan
NCSU Libraries
Robert Uomini [CONTRACTOR]
>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
>> Mosaic Communications Corporation, based in Mountain View, California,
>> is a new technology company that intends to provide software and services
>> to companies and consumers for commercial activities on the Internet.
>
>Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
>suddenly smiled upon? It sounds very much like you know what you're doing,
>but I can't say I've ever seen an Internet server dedicated to the commercial
>aspects of electronic communication (short of Compu$erve, and that doesn't
>really count). Mind explaining where the loophole lies?
The restriction previously imposed by NFSNet goes away this August, I understand.
--ru
Christopher Gronbeck
the improved technical support and upgrades will be welcomed by many
(not to take away from the outstanding job NCSA has done in developing
mosaic as far as they did!).
But let's not forget the tremendous number of individuals, schools,
universities, students, non-profit organizations, and others who can't
afford to pay much, if anything, for applications like mosaic. We
constantly give presentations in which we are proud to announce that
every school in the country can download mosaic for free and gain
incredible access to the on-line world. There are people for whom
mosaic is the tool that is easiest to use and the most effective for
accessing the information resources of internet. THere are other
browsers out there but I would be far less willing to introduce novice
internet users to the on-line world using them.
I would never want to stop anyone from taking a great product and
commercializing it, but please keep in mind the potential of mosaic
and similar tools to open up internet to a vast audience who will not
otherwise be able to get on board. I agree with earlier posts
suggesting that some version be kept free-of-charge, and also hope
that another great free tool comes along. THe only thing I fear is
that every time a product gets really good it gets snatched away
leaving a lot of people hanging, condemning them forever to the use
of tools that are not yet good enough for someone to make a bundle
off of.
I look forward to using future releases of mosaic (including forms for
the Mac!), and hope that MCC can figure out how to do really well
financially while continuing to provide a quality product that can be
accessed by people with lesser financial means.
Christopher
--
Christopher Gronbeck
Technical Stuff
Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST)
gron...@digex.net +1-202-289-5366 fax +1-202-289-5354
Chuck Shotton
> And now I
> find that the WWW is about to go commercial.
A single WWW browser becoming a piece of a commercial organization's
product line hardly constitutes "WWW going commercial." Look at this in
another light. CompuServe and AOL aren't in the business to make money off
of selling their GUI front end to their services. They make money off of
providing useful information to their customers at a price the market will
bear.
Likewise with Mosaic Communications Corp. They may make a little capital up
front off the sale of client software, but as other users have pointed out,
free alternatives will always exist and in many cases will exceed the
functionality of commercial versions. I'd suspect that MCC's business plan
shows a LOT of revenue from their "virtual mall" and not so much from the
Mosaic sales.
It is the information providers that make the Web what it is. It's nice to
have powerful WWW clients, but it's a lot nicer to have good information to
browse. As of right now, almost every Web site is free. When you're charged
for every URL you access, then you can complain about the Web going
commercial. Until then, don't begrudge some hard-working individuals a
little capitalistic success with some GUI technology.
As always, when nice free/shareware goes commercial, it leaves the door
open for enterprising software authors to make a new "free" version. This
starts the cycle all over again. It's happened with other NCSA products
(Telnet->InterCon) and it'll happen with future ones as well, I'm sure.
--_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_\_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Chuck Shotton \
Assistant Director, Academic Computing \ "Are we there yet?"
U. of Texas Health Science Center Houston \
csho...@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu (713) 794-5650 \
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-\-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Chris Wilson
>Mosaic Communication Company's core technical staff consists of:
>
> * Virtually the entire core Mosaic technology development team from
>the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- Eric Bina,
>Chris Houck, Rob McCool, Jon Mittelhauser, and Aleks Totic -- as well as
>Lou Montulli, author of Lynx.
I'd like to take public offense at this. First of all, considering that the
above does not include me, it is NOT "virtually the entire core Mosaic
development team" from NCSA. As I am one of the two people in that group
who were full-time employees for any length of time, that is incorrect. There
are also still people left at NCSA working on Mosaic. (Not to mention that not
everyone on that list was part of the "Mosaic development team".)
I also resent the implications of "Mosaic ... has until now only been
available in unsupported, non-commercial-grade form." Unless you have a
product right now, it still is, and unless you plan on having a product out
in the next month, you won't be the first.
MCC is *NOT* the only company developing WWW client/server/authoring tools
commercially. Obviously, the company that I work for, Spry, Inc., is doing
this also. We are currently scheduled for our first release of our client
suite in mid-June.
>Also, anyone with solid experience in this whole area (you know who
>you are :-) interested in joining the company in the near future,
>please drop me a note.
Heh. Obviously the same goes for Spry.
-Chris Wilson
WWW Product Development Lead
Spry, Inc.
cwi...@spry.com
Can You Say Puyallup?
> The restriction previously imposed by NFSNet goes away this August, I
> understand.
Feel free to redirect followups if you see fit, but mind elaborating? Or
pointing me somewhere where this can be confirmed/explained? I hope this
doesn't mean we get the Green Card disaster raised to the tenth power every
single day.
Casey Barton
>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>: Mosaic Communications Corporation
>: Corporate Synopsis
>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
>the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
>by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be...
Before people start to get upset about the "death" of public domain
Mosaic, just consider these two words:
Microsoft Mosaic.
<shudder>
It could be worse. Much worse.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Casey Barton (a guy) cba...@clark.dgim.doc.ca |
| http://pctcp132.dgcp.doc.ca/personal/index.html |
Brad Spachman
(Christopher Gronbeck) wrote:
> I would never want to stop anyone from taking a great product and
> commercializing it, but please keep in mind the potential of mosaic
> and similar tools to open up internet to a vast audience who will not
> otherwise be able to get on board. I agree with earlier posts
> suggesting that some version be kept free-of-charge, and also hope
> that another great free tool comes along. THe only thing I fear is
> that every time a product gets really good it gets snatched away
> leaving a lot of people hanging, condemning them forever to the use
> of tools that are not yet good enough for someone to make a bundle
> off of.
I recall a lot of similar controversy occurring when Eudora for the
Macintosh went "commercial." I think Steve Dorner has done an admirable job
in maintaining both the freeware version of Eudora (currently supporting
MIME, even) and improving the feature set in order to convince people to
upgrade to Eudora 2. After hearing about some of the available features in
Eudora 2, it went on my software purchasing list. The freeware version
retains funtionality, but the cool stuff goes into the "Pro" version.
I think Mosaic is entirely capable of making the same transition if they
keep mimimal support for the new HTML "languages" being developed right now
in the "free" version of Mosaic so that people have an elegant, yet
up-to-date, functional browser, and put the editing features and all the
bells-'n-whistles into the payware Mosaic.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There are two things that have no limit: |Brad Spachman
Femininity--and the means of taking |Northwestern University
advantage of it." |Theatre/Chemistry
--from "La Femme Nikita" |b-spa...@nwu.edu
Ken Meltsner
While I'm more of a bleeding heart liberal than a free-market conservative,
I think this is all great. The world gets another well-funded development team
that will do all the things needed to make a really great browser, NCSA
probably gets a revenue stream (did MCC pay for the "Mosaic" name? The
Mosaic source?), and, I believe, the original Mosaic will still be available.
Besides, I figure the *really* exciting work will be in servers and content
development, (I've staked a part of my career on it) and in figuring out
how to make all of this pay for the folks (both private and government)
who have invested their time and money in it.
The US Government has poured funds into Mosaic/WWW/Internet development
activities, just as it poured funds and land grants into the railroads in
the previous century, or into highways in this one. This is an investment,
not charity. Successful investments pay off.
Unless this is just a toy for the information junkies like me.
Ken Meltsner
Carlos A. Varela
>ma...@netcom13.netcom.com (Marc Andreessen) writes:
>>Mosaic Communication Company's core technical staff consists of:
>>
>> * Virtually the entire core Mosaic technology development team from
>>the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- Eric Bina,
>>Chris Houck, Rob McCool, Jon Mittelhauser, and Aleks Totic -- as well as
>>Lou Montulli, author of Lynx.
>I'd like to take public offense at this. First of all, considering that the
>above does not include me, it is NOT "virtually the entire core Mosaic
>development team" from NCSA. As I am one of the two people in that group
>who were full-time employees for any length of time, that is incorrect. There
>are also still people left at NCSA working on Mosaic. (Not to mention that not
>everyone on that list was part of the "Mosaic development team".)
>>Also, anyone with solid experience in this whole area (you know who
>>you are :-) interested in joining the company in the near future,
>>please drop me a note.
>Heh. Obviously the same goes for Spry.
I thought it was relevant to include this information from the NCSA
What's New Page:
Staff changes in the NCSA Software Development Group.
We are pleased to welcome Larry Jackson, who comes to us from General
Dynamics in Newport, RI, to the NCSA Software Development Group.
Larry will join the NCSA team as technical manager for an expanded
NCSA Mosaic and cyberspace tools effort.
Eric Bina, Aleks Totic, and Jon Mittelhauser, excellent programmers all,
will be leaving at the end of April to pursue opportunities in the
commercial world. Eric, Aleks, and Jon have made significant
contributions to NCSA Mosaic in particular, and the cyberspace
community in general. We wish them all the very best in their new
ventures.
Dave Thompson, author of NCSA Collage and NCSA X-Image, will be
moving onto the NCSA Mosaic team. Dave has enormous experience
with X windows system development and networked environments, and
was the person who first introduced the SDG to the World Wide Web.
Look for Dave in cyberspace.
We will keep you posted as others in SDG, and other parts of NCSA,
move onto cyberspace tools projects as we expand these efforts. We want
to thank everyone for their expressions of support for our work, and the
great reception it continues to receive. The next releases will be hitting
the net this summer, and we look forward to a new generation of
net-based capabilities.
And, NCSA is happy to announce that we are looking for a few good men
and women to work on the next generation of cyberspace software. If you
would like to be a part of a great team, and help us pursue our public
service and technology development missions, then we would be glad to
hear from you. Here is more info on the position, and how to apply.
That info is at
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/job-announcement.html
---
- Carlos A. Varela cva...@uiuc.edu
NCSA Research Assistant / CS Grad Student
<A HREF="http://fiaker.ncsa.uiuc.edu:8080/">home page</A>
Brian Combs
>I also resent the implications of "Mosaic ... has until now only been
>available in unsupported, non-commercial-grade form." Unless you have a
>product right now, it still is, and unless you plan on having a product out
>in the next month, you won't be the first.
Thanks for the great lead-in, Chris.
As it turns out, there already is a commercial version of Mosaic shipping.
In April, we released the first version of Global-Wide Help and Infor-
mation System, or GWHIS (pronounced "gee-wiz").
Among it's many possible applications is the ability to tie it in with
another application for context-sensitive, online help and documentation.
GWHIS currently runs on all the popular UNIX platforms including Linux.
We will be on Mac and MS Windows in the next 30-60 days.
Oh, and to follow the lead, I'll let everyone know that Quadralay is
currently looking for MS Windows programmers. And you would get to live
in Austin!
Brian Combs
--
**********************************************************************
* Brian Combs * Tel: 512-346-9199 Fax: 512-346-8990 *
* Quadralay Corporation * FTP Address: ftp.quadralay.com *
* combs @ quadralay.com * WWW Server: www.quadralay.com *
**********************************************************************
"Information Tools to build your business on!"
"When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl"
Thomas Boutell
Todd Postma <tapostma@fission> wrote:
>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>: Mosaic Communications Corporation
>: Corporate Synopsis
>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>
>Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
>the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
>by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be priced
>out of my (and many other's) reach. Why is it that great ventures which
>grow partly because of their great availability suddenly get perverted into
>money making ventures? First there is talk of charging for Internet access
Have they mentioned a price tag for Mosaic? No, they haven't. What if
it's reasonable? Oh, for you "reasonable" is defined as "free"? Oh,
never mind. Programmers who want to make a living need not apply.
-T
Free software is great and I write a lot of it, but I have to make
a living too.
--
bou...@netcom.com, purveyor of fine HTML pages to the biology trade.
FAQ-keeper for comp.infosystems.www. Drop by and learn about the Web.
<a href="http://siva.cshl.org/boutell.html"><em>Thomas Boutell</em></A>
Andy McFadden
>Feel free to redirect followups if you see fit, but mind elaborating? Or
>pointing me somewhere where this can be confirmed/explained? I hope this
>doesn't mean we get the Green Card disaster raised to the tenth power every
>single day.
Internet != Usenet.
FWIW, I've gotten a few pieces of "junk mail" already via the Internet.
Not a good trend. I have a recurring nightmare about ADVO appearing
on the net.
(Well, at least they don't have to kill any trees this way.)
--
fad...@amdahl.com (Andy McFadden) [These are my opinions, not Amdahl policies]
You get what you pay for, if you know what you are doing.
PGP Otherwise, you get what you deserve. RIPEM
Joseph T. Lapp
Marc Andreessen <ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> Why is it that great ventures which grow partly because of their
> great availability suddenly get perverted into money making
> ventures?
>
>Because we live in a free-enterprise system where government-funded
>research and development is at least partially intended to be an
>incubation method for technologies that then become commercially
>distributed and supported products. It's the natural course of
>events, not a "perversion".
... and because capitalism has worldwide proven itself to be more
hardy and more progressive than socialism ...
\+/ ________
Joe Lapp \/ |/_ /<\_, O / ///`\ Knowledge
Software Engineer >-\ / o__ / < \\ / (o)^(o) is wonderfully
jl...@nova.umd.edu | _,>/'_ /_______/ ( ) dangerous.
jos...@pulse-sys.com | (_) \(_) /|\ `---' -- my maxim
JSu...@library.ucla.edu
that I actually like what's happened with the whole WWW community. My
thoughts come from the perspective that we should evaluate not just
what's cool today, but also the context of what's possible and how to
enable the future.
In <2qn8gk$l...@agate.berkeley.edu>, tapostma@fission (Todd Postma) writes:
>Marc Andreessen (marca@.netcom.com) wrote:
Oops ... guess the PR got ahead of the new venture's technology, e.g.
posting from a char based shell on a $17.50 month dial in personal
account :)
>Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
>the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
Does this mean that <P> will become a real structural element or will it
remain a mere formatting directive because, in their own paraphrased
words, "nobody using emacs or vi wants to type </P>"?
Does this mean that content will become important or, in their own
paraphrased words, "if it doesn't have images, it's irrelevant", said
even in the context of print impaired users?
Does this mean that the logic will become a real parser vrs, in their
own paraphrased words, "an exception handler".
Does this mean that content will be created so that it can be
algorithmically reused when HTML is no longer the latest & greatest?
>by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be priced
>out of my (and many other's) reach. Why is it that great ventures which
>grow partly because of their great availability suddenly get perverted into
>money making ventures?
Hey haven't you heard, when you adopt market perspectives, if it's
free, it's not worth anything to you :( Other people would tell you that
it's an attitude like that that is holding you back from cashing in :(
It's going to be an interesting time on the net! Who was it who said
that "censorship is treated as damage on the Internet and is routed
around it"? Could that be changed to "artificial commercialization is
treated as damage on the Internet and is routed around it"?
Will interactivity mean more that a form for credit card and shipping
info?
Jeff Suttor Pgmr/Analyst Library Information Systems
University Research Library (310)206-5565 Fax:(310)206-4109
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90024-1575 JSu...@Library.UCLA.Edu
Denton Gentry
>Robert Uomini [CONTRACTOR] (uom...@fractals.Eng.Sun.COM) wrote:
>> The restriction previously imposed by NFSNet goes away this August, I
>> understand.
>
>Feel free to redirect followups if you see fit, but mind elaborating? Or
>pointing me somewhere where this can be confirmed/explained? I hope this
>doesn't mean we get the Green Card disaster raised to the tenth power every
>single day.
Expect the Green Card Lottery type flood posts to every newsgroup to expand greatly in the next year. Canter and Siegel got enough publicity in mainstream newspapers to make other people aware of the possibility who otherwise would not have known. Canter and Siegel are themselves founding a company, CyberSell, to sell advertising on the internet. (Cheap rates! Make everyone pay their uucp feed to bring your ads across! Get `em while they're hot!) C&S have already threatened lawsuits for Internet Indirect, the service provider whose machine they used to post the Green Card Lottery message, which crashed badly under the volume of hate mail that post generated. I have little doubt they will use the courts early and often in their new enterprise as well.
Denny
Thad Phetteplace x4461
: Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
: suddenly smiled upon? It sounds very much like you know what you're doing,
: but I can't say I've ever seen an Internet server dedicated to the commercial
: aspects of electronic communication (short of Compu$erve, and that doesn't
: really count). Mind explaining where the loophole lies?
This is a common misconception. There is no ban against commercial
traffic on the Internet. There ARE restrictions regarding commercial
traffic on the NSFNET backbone and other related networks. Read their
Acceptable Use Policy to learn the details. If you get your Internet
connection through a major provider (such as UUNET) you can probably
reach up to %80 of the commercial networks out there without ever
touching the NSF backbone. The largest growth in the Internet is
taking place on the commercial side, and that is a *good thing* IMHO.
As for commercial servers, check out hhtp://www.commerce.net.
Have fun,
--
Thad Phetteplace
Network Systems Analyst, Allen-Bradley Co.
Phone: (414)382-4461
Email: tdph...@mke.ab.com
The opinions expressed here are entirely my own and not that of my employer.
I am not a slob, I am simply doing an experiment in domestic entropy!
Dave Johnson
>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>: Mosaic Communications Corporation
>: Corporate Synopsis
>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>
>Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
>the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
>by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be priced
>out of my (and many other's) reach. Why is it that great ventures which
>grow partly because of their great availability suddenly get perverted into
>money making ventures? First there is talk of charging for Internet access
>based on bandwidth (instead of fixed connect rates) because commercial companies
>are going to control access (instead of Merit/NSF). Then comes Motif which
>started charging for X functionality (that now has become ~standard.) And now I
>find that the WWW is about to go commercial.
Whoa, time out for a few questions/clarifications:
Is the WWW going commercial? I don't think so. All the HTML documents
that are out there and accessible now will still be accessible. Mosaic
is merely a (way cool) interface to those documents; its not the WWW.
You might want to be sure you grab the Mosaic source while its still
available for free. Then you can modify it as much as you wish to keep
up with the evolution of HTML and HTML+.
Is Mosaic no longer going to be available for free? I would like
some clarification on this one. Is the NCSA turning over the rights
to Mosaic, or are Marc and company going to build a "new-and-improved"
product that looks a lot like Mosaic but you have to pay for it?
--
Dave Johnson
"You're not too smart, are you? I like that in a man."
--Kathleen Turner in Body Heat
Frank Peters
>It's going to be an interesting time on the net! Who was it who said
>that "censorship is treated as damage on the Internet and is routed
>around it"? Could that be changed to "artificial commercialization is
>treated as damage on the Internet and is routed around it"?
What, exactly, is "artificial commercialization"? I'm trying to translate
that into english and having a hard time.
--
Frank Peters - UNIX Systems Programmer - Mississippi State University
Internet: f...@CC.MsState.Edu - Phone: (601)325-7030 - FAX: (601)325-8921
Marc Andreessen
JSu...@Library.UCLA.Edu writes:
... my admittedly snippy response ...
>Marc Andreessen (marca@.netcom.com) wrote:
Oops ... guess the PR got ahead of the new venture's technology,
e.g. posting from a char based shell on a $17.50 month dial in
personal account :)
Our BARRnet/PacBell T1 line should be up next week.
Jonathan L Neuenschwander
>I thought it was relevant to include this information from the NCSA
>What's New Page:
>Staff changes in the NCSA Software Development Group.
[Interesting staff bios deleted in the name of bandwith]
My thanks to Carlos for pointing out that Mosaic is still the property of
NCSA, and actually has people supporting and developing for it, and therefore
is still alive, well, thriving, and free. I just read through roughly 25
posts which strongly suggested otherwise.
Folks, folks, I am seriously considering investing heavily in Elli Lilly & Co,
for I have seen the future and it is named Prozac. I mean, a rather large
number of you SERIOUSLY need to grab a beer and relax! Commercial web browsers
do not mean that the free ones suddenly disappear, even the free ones that have
been liscensed (last I heard, 3 companies had liscensed Mosaic, but it looks
like that number is a little low now). They are not mutually exclusive, ok?
Actually, I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with, it's going to
have to be one HECK of a piece of software to get to consider paying for it
when I can have Mosaic for free. It'll take alot more than a few added
features.
To all those from the Mosaic team who have moved on to the commercial world,
good luck and I hope you all become millionaires, you've EARNED it!
Jonathan
software to get me to think about buying it when I can get Mosaic for free.
--
******* ** ** ******* ******** ** ** ******** jona...@ecn.purdue.edu
** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** ** * *** A drive-by shooter on
****** ** ** ****** ** ** ** ** * *** the information
**** ****** **** *** ******** ****** ******** super-highway.
Marc Andreessen
di...@theoris.rz.uni-konstanz.de (Dierk Lucyga) writes:
At least we have good counter measures on the net. Set up a cronjob
that sends the bible (just because its sooo big) every five
minutes.... I heard the this "green-card weirdo" got megabytes of
mailbombing so that his service had to close down for some time.
They kicked him out.
...and he and his wife are now "considering suing some of their Usenet
detractors for defamation of character", according to the New York
Times. Ms. Siegel says, "I think there are going to be suits, and
they well may come from us."
So watch it! <stern look>
A lawyer-lover who would never ever EVER even THINK about mailbombing
a lawyer, and will definitely vote for lawyer Dan Quayle for president
in '96 to boot,
steve johnson
jona...@schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu (Jonathan L Neuenschwander) wrote:
> My thanks to Carlos for pointing out that Mosaic is still the property of
> NCSA, and actually has people supporting and developing for it, and therefore
> is still alive, well, thriving, and free. I just read through roughly 25
> posts which strongly suggested otherwise.
yeah, let's remember that "NCSA Mosaic is Copyrighted by the University of
Illiniois." or at least that's what it says when i open it up on my mac.
presumably i get similar messages on the pc and x machines i use, i'm just
not sitting in front of them right now. i'm no lawyer, but that tells me
that if you use it w/o permission or make money from it without negotiating
a fee they're gonna sick those green card lawyers on you (actually UI
probably has much better lawyers on retainer...). but - could there be
another mosaic, a new browser? can MCC even use the word mosaic in their
corporate title legally if they're referring to the ncsa mosaic? who
knows? who cares? who's posting this stream of conciousness drivel?
--
:wq
Bryan D. Boyle
In article <cbarton.11...@clark.dgim.doc.ca>, cba...@clark.dgim.doc.ca (Casey Barton) writes:
|>
|>tapostma@fission (Todd Postma) writes:
|>>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
|>>: ...[stuff deleted]...
|>>: Mosaic Communications Corporation
|>>: Corporate Synopsis
|>>: ...[stuff deleted]...
|>
|>>Sad sad sad. I'm cheered by the fact that the WWW will finally get
|>>the professional attention it so desparately needs. But I'm saddened
|>>by the fact another great public domain resource is about to be...
|>
|> Before people start to get upset about the "death" of public domain
|>Mosaic, just consider these two words:
|>
|>
|> Microsoft Mosaic.
|>
|>
|>
|> <shudder>
|>
|> It could be worse. Much worse.
Considering this, my comments of yesterday are retracted (quickly)...:)
--
Bryan D. Boyle |Physical: ER&E, Clinton, NJ (908) 730-3338
#include <disclaimer> |Virtual: bdb...@erenj.com
"If everyone is thinking alike, then someone isn't thinking." -Patton
Pardon me, I'm lost, can you direct me to the information superhighway?
Thomas Redman
has not rolled over and died just because a few (many)
software developers (very good ones) left. If you don't believe
me, check out the pre-alpha version 2.0 of NCSA Mosaic for the
Mac at the World Wide Developers Conference. I will have Kim
Stephenson follow up with some additional info on this.
We are continuing full steam ahead. And believe me, we will
go forward with Mosaic development! Rest assured, the other
platforms will retool and be up to speed in a very short
period of time. As for the Mac development team, we lost
one of three full time developers, and Aleks will be missed.
But no biggie.
I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, but even good
software developers can be replaced. I have been a software
developer for a long time, and this is not the first exodus
I haver ever seen. And of all the untimely departures I have
experienced, there has never been one that has contributed to
the depletion of the ozone layer. Life, and development, goes
on.
There is a bigger issue, however. Those short timers knew how
to party, and I will miss them...
Thomas Redman (red...@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Software Development Group, National Center for Supercomputing
Applications
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
(217) 244-0781; fax (217) 244-1987
Chris Wilson
>Whoa, time out for a few questions/clarifications:
>
>Is the WWW going commercial? I don't think so. All the HTML documents
>You might want to be sure you grab the Mosaic source while its still
>available for free. Then you can modify it as much as you wish to keep
>up with the evolution of HTML and HTML+.
>
>Is Mosaic no longer going to be available for free? I would like
>some clarification on this one. Is the NCSA turning over the rights
>to Mosaic, or are Marc and company going to build a "new-and-improved"
>product that looks a lot like Mosaic but you have to pay for it?
OK, here's a little clarification: NCSA Mosaic will (barring some _DRASTIC_
policy changes in the last month since I left) ALWAYS be freely available
for non-commercial use. Anyone wishing to make commercial use of it, however,
will have to license it (as my company, Spry, Inc., has done.) This is a
revenue stream for NCSA, to continue supporting the "free" versions of Mosaic.
NCSA does not plan to "turn over the rights to Mosaic" to ANYONE, at least not
the last time I checked. I believe (and correct me if I'm wrong, Marc et al)
that MCC will redevelop their own WWW browser (Mosaic, if you will, although
I'm trying to avoid confusion w/ NCSA Mosaic), and therefore won't have to
pay a royalty fee to NCSA (and won't be supporting them in the future.) The
source code to NCSA Mosaic (X version, at least) will also always be available.
Anyone at NCSA, correct me if I'm wrong - I have been out of the inside loop
for a month now.
MCC is allowed to use the name "Mosaic" simply because it isn't
copyrighted or trademarked by NCSA - not due to any licensing scheme for use
of the name. (Of course, Marc probably thought the name up in the first place
anyway. :^) Lynx could have been named "Text-mode Mosaic", Bill Perry's
Emacs browser could be "Emacs Mosaic", they could actually _be_ "Mosaic
servers", ad nauseum. (And ad CERN angryum! :^)
There will, of course, be advantages to using a commercially supplied
browser... if you purchase Spry's product, you'll get not only a radically
enhanced (already) version of Mosaic, but also the support of a large, proven
technical support team, which is something that NCSA does not have the funding
to support. Presumably MCC will offer the same type of advantages.
In addition, because of Spry's licensing of NCSA's code, and our
links with the rest of the Web community, we will maintain guaranteed compatibility with the de facto "free" standards of the Web. With the past
differences of opinion in how "standards" should be developed, Spry has made
a commitment to standardization, for our own sanity if nothing else.
-Chris Wilson
WWW Development Product Lead
Spry, Inc.
cwi...@spry.com
Marc Sullivan
Marc Andreessen, ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu writes:
.
> Ms. Siegel says, "I think there are going to be suits, .
. .
.
I wonder if that was the plan all along. Annoy everyone,
recieve hate mail, and then sue whomever is associated
with deep pockets. Clever, very clever.
Dierk Lucyga
> FWIW, I've gotten a few pieces of "junk mail" already via the Internet.
> Not a good trend. I have a recurring nightmare about ADVO appearing
> on the net.
At least we have good counter measures on the net. Set up a cronjob that
sends the bible (just because its sooo big) every five minutes....
I heard the this "green-card weirdo" got megabytes of mailbombing so that
his service had to close down for some time. They kicked him out.
--
Papernet: | Internet:
Dierk Lucyga | Dierk....@uni-konstanz.de
Universitaet Konstanz | (MIME and Metamail accepted)
D-78434 Konstanz |------------------------------------
Voicenet: +49 7531 88 2404 | PGP 2.3a Public Key Available
----------------------------------------------------------------
Above posting does not necessarily tally with my employers point of view.
Phillip J. Windley
In article <2qqng9$f...@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu> Thomas Redman <red...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> writes:
I hope I don't offend anyone by saying this, but even good
software developers can be replaced.
Yes, graveyards are full of indispensable people.
--
Phillip J. Windley, Asst. Professor | win...@cs.byu.edu
Laboratory for Applied Logic |
Dept. of Computer Science, TMCB 3370 |
Brigham Young University | Phone: 801.378.3722
Provo UT 84602-6576 | Fax: 801.378.7775
------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you use WWW, I'm <A HREF="http://lal.cs.byu.edu/people/windley/windley.html">here</A>.
David Gadd
: >:-(
: Eric Lease Morgan
: NCSU Libraries
It appears the academic community isn't fond of the idea. I'm curious will
this new venture be supporting the academic and research community, or are
they on their own?
Phillip J. Windley
In article <2qq8c4$c...@hermes.uni-konstanz.de> di...@theoris.rz.uni-konstanz.de (Dierk Lucyga) writes:
At least we have good counter measures on the net. Set up a cronjob that
sends the bible (just because its sooo big) every five minutes....
I heard the this "green-card weirdo" got megabytes of mailbombing so that
his service had to close down for some time. They kicked him out.
Sorry, this is not exactly the proper forum, but if we're going to stop
this kind of thing, we need to do it right.
Yes, the service was closed down, but the green card weirdo's considered it
a success and are now selling packets telling others how to do the same
thing!
The right thing to do is to give them too many false positives so that they
have to expend resources to sift the real responses from the false positive
responses. If you send them garbage, its too easy to sift. Make them
spend lots of money for nothing and they'll stop.
Yechezkal-Shimon Gutfreund
old tired political lines. It seems people get into a certain
political rut, and see the whole world and everything in it
breaking down into the same categories over and over again.
I put it to you that Marc's announcement is really a GOOD
THING, if you only have the ability to see a little deeper
into the issue.
Background:
It appears that the TELCO's, cables Co's, wireless, etc. have
given up on their mega-merger deals. The evolving world of
universal ubiqutous digital communication - is not something
that you can corner - no matter what sort of capital you bring
to the table. Attempts to monopolize segments of the market,
while they may appear superficially threatening - upon deeper
analysis one will see that all that is being created are the
same old blind dinosaurs that will be incapable of the innovations
that are needed to exploit these evolving networks.
So these capital rich guys are now sitting on the sidelines.
Along comes Jim Clark. Who does not seem to originally have planned
to go in the direction of a Mosaic Computer Corp. But it
seems he does have an idea for what is hot, and can change diretions.
Here is a guy with captial - but what is he buying? Not large
piecies of infrastructure - but people!
This is the good thing. The hot property to acquire these days
seems to be people. Those with talent, insight, and vision
as to where and how to create applications for the evolving
network infrastucture.
We should be happy about this. For those of us with hot ideas,
we can become hot property. Fought over like sports stars.
[I am certainly trying to plant this image in the mind of my
management :-) ]
I have seen the same analysis in Buisness Week, when talking
about the hot CD-ROM multimedia companies. What is hot is
not the CD-ROM titles, but the artists behind these titles.
When people become valuable, and creative people become exteremly
valuable - this is a good thing.
I am glad to see that Marc, Eric, Jon etc. have become hot
propertly, and I wish them well.
Of course, this is no longer the go go days of the early 80's. With
all its start up AI companies and 6-figure Salaried CS AI Phd's.
Things will have to fly - based on products.
And it is going to be hard to do this. Mosaic succeeded well because
it is one of those "ah-ha" ideas. Simple, concise, and quickly
graspable. A simple paradigm-shift that greatly cleared up the
confusion about network applications. See Thomas Kuhn <cite>The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions</cite>.
From now on the slogging for MCC, SPRY and others will be harder.
All lot of people understand what WWW and Mosaic is about - and
simple paradigm shifts are not anymore going to create the
next killer app.
Now, of course, most people are going to be doing a lot of the
heavy incremental work elaborating the Mosaic metaphor.
I would say that the first 20% has been done with this metaphor,
but 80% of the bang has been gotton. The remaining 20% of the
work will require 80% additional work. But this sort of
incremental work is for those who don't have the vision to
see what comes next.
What I think you Marc, Eric, etc. are looking for is the next
killer app. It won't be so easy next time. But if you have
the insight and vision and will - you will get it. I wish you luck..
---
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Yechezkal-Shimon Gutfreund sgutf...@gte.com [MIME]
GTE Laboratories, Waltham MA ftp://ftp.gte.com/pub/circus/home/home.html
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Kim Stephenson
that we are still working on and supporting NCSA Mosaic. It is true
that a number of good developers have left BUT like any organization
(commercial or otherwise) turn-over DOES happen. That does not mean
that the projects those people were involved in come to a grinding
halt. The fact of the matter is; work has slowed only slightly (and
temporarily) on 2 platforms and not at all on the Macintosh.
We are currently in PreAlpha testing phases on 2.0.0 for the Macintosh
and expect to release a public Alpha in the VERY near future (probably
early June - maybe sooner). Watch this news group for further postings
of its availability.
Second; MCC is NOT the only or even the first to jump into the
commercial ring with a WEB browser. Right now there are 8 companies
that have licensed NCSA Mosaic for commercialization. MCC IS NOT ONE
OF THEM. There are probably others out there working just as hard on
REDEVELOPING their own web browser. Commercialization is a good thing
for this type of tool because it will help continue to spur the
proliferation of information available on the net for all the
browsers to access. However, there seems to be a confusion between
what is MCC and what is NCSA. MCC is not a "commercial branch" of
NCSA. In Marc's original note he cites a number of articles that were
written explicitly about NCSA Mosaic leading one to believe that they
were written about either MCC or the people themselves. This is
misleading. In addition he states that "Virtually the entire core
Mosaic technology development team" has moved to MCC, I like Chris
Wilson take exception to this statement. Although Marc, Eric, Jon, and
Aleks were important to and key players in the development of Mosaic,
NO single person (or even a small number) can take sole credit for this
monster. Like MOST projects of this magnitude it was a collection of
thoughts, ideas, brainstorming sessions, technical support, document
creation, server creation and support from a lot of people. And
without the WEB and CERN there wouldn't be a Mosaic.
NCSA has been long known for good public domain and free with copyright
software, such as Telnet, Image, PalEdit, XDataSlice, AudibleImage,
Collage, Mosaic etc. This is not going to stop. Life goes on and the
work continues.
Kim Stephenson (ki...@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Will Sadler
> MCC is allowed to use the name "Mosaic" simply because it isn't
>copyrighted or trademarked by NCSA - not due to any licensing scheme for use
>of the name. (Of course, Marc probably thought the name up in the first place
>anyway. :^)
Marc's contribution aside, I am almost positive that if NCSA wanted to
trademark Mosaic they still could (unless they have signed something
saying they won't.) Mosaic is probably copyrighted, so I find it
hard to believe they wouldn't want the trademark rights too.
It is, after all, one way to make money :-)
Will
--
***************************************************************************
* _______________\|/_ Will Sadler wi...@polecat.law.indiana.edu *
* Laser 151008 /|\ sad...@indiana.edu *
***************************************************************************
William M. Eldridge
>sends the bible (just because its sooo big) every five minutes....
>I heard the this "green-card weirdo" got megabytes of mailbombing so that
>his service had to close down for some time. They kicked him out.
The problem is it also shut down the whole service for perhaps
1000 users, and the resulting arguments on the net took up much more
bandwidth than the original letter. The best approach is for service
providers to have a strong contract saying what kind of advertising
is not permitted, and for people on the net to send a short note to
the service provider first explaining their displeasure.
Think of it like toilets. If the fifth floor is mad at a guy on the
first floor, and we flush our toilets every 2 minutes, we might get
even with the guy on the first floor, but everyone else in the
building is surely affected (at least those on the first floor).
--
Bill Eldridge.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:Projects: routers that will route
bi...@lifesci.ucla.edu \ /\ /\ /\ / servers that will serve
310-206-3960 (3987 fax) / \/ \/ \/ \ mailers that will mail
Ich bin auch Dagberter.:.:..:..:..:.:.:.& modems that will mode
Robert Denny
> [... Marc A's "announcement"...]
>
>I'd like to take public offense at this. First of all, considering that the
>above does not include me, it is NOT "virtually the entire core Mosaic
>development team" from NCSA. As I am one of the two people in that group
>who were full-time employees for any length of time, that is incorrect. There
>are also still people left at NCSA working on Mosaic (Not to mention that not
>everyone on that list was part of the "Mosaic development team".)
YES! GO GET 'EM CHRIS!
>I also resent the implications of "Mosaic ... has until now only been
>available in unsupported, non-commercial-grade form." Unless you have a
>product right now, it still is, and unless you plan on having a product out
>in the next month, you won't be the first.
Boy, are you right. I _hate_ that kind of marketing slobber. "until now"
indeed.
>MCC is *NOT* the only company developing WWW client/server/authoring tools
>commercially. Obviously, the company that I work for, Spry, Inc., is doing
>this also. We are currently scheduled for our first release of our client
>suite in mid-June.
I don't know about "obviously", the tombstone ads in the back of Networld
are OK, but they say nothing about your work on Web-related products. You
might pass a suggestion along to Dave Pool that you need to counter MCC's
marketing attack right away. Your counter-point post is a great start.
-- Bob
Dan Newcombe
>In article <2qo5h4$2...@amhux3.amherst.edu> ljne...@unix.amherst.edu (Can You Say Puyallup?) writes:
>>Feel free to redirect followups if you see fit, but mind elaborating? Or
>>pointing me somewhere where this can be confirmed/explained? I hope this
>>doesn't mean we get the Green Card disaster raised to the tenth power every
>>single day.
>FWIW, I've gotten a few pieces of "junk mail" already via the Internet.
>Not a good trend. I have a recurring nightmare about ADVO appearing
>on the net.
Personally, I don't mind a message or two here and there across news groups as
long as it's relevant (ie. The mosaic announcement on comp.info.www was
relelvant. The green card was not.) It helps one keep up with things.
But when Usenet starts getting flooded and normal (?) conversation can't take
place because of too many ads, then I'm sure we will show what an anarchy can
do.
Now, If I start getting unsolicitated mailings to my account, then I will get
a little more pissed. Other than that, I doubt that commercial usage of the
net will have much of an impact.
--
Dan Newcombe newc...@aa.csc.peachnet.edu
Clayton State College Morrow, Georgia
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"And the man in the mirror has sad eyes." -Marillion
Thomas Boutell
>
>A lawyer-lover who would never ever EVER even THINK about mailbombing
>a lawyer, and will definitely vote for lawyer Dan Quayle for president
>in '96 to boot,
>
Castor & Oil
Bloodsuckers at Law
Bismarck, South Dakota 66666
Dear Mr. Andreessen,
It has come to our attention that you have employed levels of
sarcasm exceeding local, state and federal guidelines with regard
to our recent Internet activities.
Please fill out the following convenient lawsuit form to keep
things as straightforward as possible.
How much money do you have? ______________________
How much money does MCC have? ____________________
Add lines 1 and 2 and enter total: _______________
Please send the value of line 3 (if greater than zero)
to the address above.
Sincerely,
Two VERY NICE immigrant-manipulating soulless hellspawn.
-T
(P.S. Ironically, the Quayles are big on lawsuit reform, supposedly)
--
bou...@netcom.com, purveyor of fine HTML pages to the biology trade.
FAQ-keeper for comp.infosystems.www. Drop by and learn about the Web.
<a href="http://siva.cshl.org/boutell.html"><em>Thomas Boutell</em></A>
William M. Eldridge
a service economy - e.g. people who provide services
like Mosaic. There's an obvious demand for Web/Mosaic
type services, and like any highly competitive field,
the products will be rather cheap. Word processors,
databases, spreadsheets for the desktop computer are
all quite reasonably priced (some quite free). That
there is room for someone to make money on this is a
Good Thing (tm), since if there's business interest,
there's money invested, and it will stick around and
grow. You could say, "Yeah, but it will grow anyway."
Possibly, but most likely not to anything really
exotic and involved. People use Mosaic once, and then
they say, "But can it do this, this, this and this?",
and the answer is generally, "Well, some day maybe."
With a well-staffed team of developers, Mosaic has
the chance to be an extremely useful tool for interfacing
your TV with the internet, for doing your banking and
shopping and watching movies and setting up archival
systems, and so on. More than anything, because it's there,
it's started, and it's cheap. And it will stay cheap. Why?
Because banks, stores, and other service providers will give
away the front-end access if you're going to buy lots
of services. It's why I can get free subscriptions
to network magazines.
I know that the OmniGroup makes a nice Web client
for Nexts - free - but they don't really have so
much time to spend on it because they have to survive,
which means doing other work. And users complain
about any possibility of paying for this. So who
will fund the development? Some business entrepreneur
who thinks he can make money off of it. Cool.
I don't know if it will be Mosaic or Omniweb or
WWW in particular that creates the home computing
revolution - I would guess that it will be something
better that comes along in a couple of years, but
this is a lot more concrete than the speculations
about what Bell Atlantic and TCI and anyone else
might do. I have video to the desk top right now.
It's terrible, but it's a start.
Chris Wilson
>cwilson (Chris Wilson) writes:
>>MCC is *NOT* the only company developing WWW client/server/authoring tools
>>commercially. Obviously, the company that I work for, Spry, Inc., is doing
>>this also. We are currently scheduled for our first release of our client
>>suite in mid-June.
>
>I don't know about "obviously", the tombstone ads in the back of Networld
>are OK, but they say nothing about your work on Web-related products. You
>might pass a suggestion along to Dave Pool that you need to counter MCC's
>marketing attack right away. Your counter-point post is a great start.
The "obviously" referred to the rest of that post. At any rate, our real
marketing blitz is set to fire soon - we didn't want to pre-date our release
date by _too_ much. :^)
-Chris Wilson
WWW Product Development Lead
Spry, Inc.
cwi...@spry.com
Simon E Spero
place in this newsgroup, Tar Heel Information Services and Project SunSITE are
proud to announce the formation of the WWWWF - The World Wide Web Wrestling
Federation. The merchandising possibilities are endless.
"YOU THINK YOU CAN SERVE FILES. YOU THINK YOU CAN SERVE FILES. YOU CAN'T
SERVE NOTHING. YOU CAN'T EVEN SERVE BREAKFAST. YOU AIN'T GONNA MAKE
IT INTO THE RING. WE'RE WHIP YOU SO BAD YOU SO HARD THERE'LL BE FLAMES
COMING OUT YOUR ROUTER. WE'RE GOING TO KICK YOU SO BAD YOU WON'T GET
NOTHING BUT CLNP FOR MONTHS"
--
Tar Heel Information Services - Nothing but Net | Welcome to TCP JAM
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I have heard the routers pinging, each to each. | Tel: +1-919-962-9107,
I do not think that they will ping to me- | Fax: +1-919-962-5604
PG
to the question posted below (also sent to mos...@ncsa.uiuc.edu at the
time). it is relevant to the current issue of who among the proliferation
of new and used browser writers, licensed by ncsa and otherwise, will be
setting FORM (and other new) standards, and how all of this will be
organized away from marketplace anarchy.
it is currently unclear what is currently envisioned beyond the ncsa form
example pages (if anything, i understand much effort goes into bringing
macmosaic et al. up to speed, but surely there is some
forward-looking thought going on as well?)
--------------------------------------------------------------
In article <CoxAF...@csc.ti.com> thr...@ra.csc.ti.com (Philip Thrift)
writes:
>
> What is a good way for a client to submit a file to a WWW server,
> via a FORM interface?
.
<FORM METHOD=POST
.
> The process-data script could then do something like
> remote copy this file:
>
> rcp [username]@[hostname]:[filename] [local-file]
> (assuming remote copy is allowed)
>
> Is there a better way?
indeed.
since you're using POST method, the entire file can be sent as
part of the input stream.
only problem is, no client currently has this implemented.
it would be simple to implement an <input name="filestream" type="file">
which would accept a path/filename in a textfield and pipe that
back to the server.
even better would be a way to bring up a little mime packer
(e.g via mpack or equivalent) to allow composition of an arbitrary mime
message with arbitrary attachments and pipe that back to the server.
there are many other obvious things that could be easily improved
in the FORM interface (e.g. allowing multiple submit buttons
with different actions in a single form, etc. -- does there
exist anywhere a list of things under consideration for implementation,
or do most of the requests end up in /dev/null due to overload?)
<a href="http://xxx.lanl.gov/pg.html">pg</a>
(speaking for the enlightened minority)
Matthew Fuchs
> Expect the Green Card Lottery type flood posts to every newsgroup
> to expand greatly in the next year. Canter and Siegel got enough
> publicity in mainstream newspapers to make other people aware of the
> possibility who otherwise would not have known. Canter and Siegel are
> themselves founding a company, CyberSell, to sell advertising on the
> internet. (Cheap rates! Make everyone pay their uucp feed to bring
> your ads across! Get `em while they're hot!)
Remember how the threat of per usage access charges sent everyone
through the roof? This scheme is only valid given fixed rates --
otherwise they'd have had to pay something for each post. Also,
service providers could possibly charge a per post charge for
commercial posts, and news sites could do so as well, on a per group
basis, for disk and bandwith. It wouldn't be too difficult to turn
this free service into a _very_ expensive deal (The figure I saw this
morning in the NYT was 6000 newsgroups. Multiply that by 10000 sites
by $2 per post, and they're out $120,000,000.) while still avoiding
government censorship. They could even be priced in such a way that
_reasonable_ usage entails _reasonable_ costs.
Matthew Fuchs
fu...@cs.nyu.edu
Unknown
>In article <2qn8gk$l...@agate.berkeley.edu>,
>Todd Postma <tapostma@fission> wrote:
>>Marc Andreessen (ma...@netcom13.netcom.com) wrote:
>>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>>: Mosaic Communications Corporation
>>: Corporate Synopsis
>>: ...[stuff deleted]...
>>
>>great availability suddenly get perverted into money making ventures? First there
>>is talk of charging for Internet access...{Stuff Deleted}
>___
>
>Have they mentioned a price tag for Mosaic? No, they haven't. What if
>it's reasonable? Oh, for you "reasonable" is defined as "free"? Oh,
>never mind. Programmers who want to make a living need not apply.
>
>-T
>
>Free software is great and I write a lot of it, but I have to make
>a living too.
>--
IMHO, I think it is great for the formation of such a corporation. If these
guys didn't do it, someone else would have anyway.
The SDG at NCSA does a lot of work to make the Internet, specifically the Web,
accessable for even some of the more computer illiterate folks. All you have
to do is look at the growth figures for the Internet since the initial release
and that will give the main reason why someone would have jumped onto this
opportunity if not these guys. Better them, than someone who was a late comer
to the whole thing.
Also, it will provide a much more stable product (not that it isn't now but,
I am using Windows :(. . .)Anyway, I digress.
Good luck. . .
Ernest E. Mindlin
Austin, Texas
Texas Dept. of Commerce
ern...@wpgate.tdoc.texas.gov
Larry Jackson
ma...@netcom13.netcom.com writes:
>Hello from Mountain View, ...
Claude Boucher, Fredricton, NB, Canada writes:
"Pardon me, if I may sound a little blunt, but... what does it mean, as
far as NCSA's version 2.0 of Mac Mosaic?"
Todd Postma, UC Berkeley writes:
"...I'm saddened by the fact another great public domain resource is
about to be priced out of my (and many other's) reach."
Phillip Hallam-Baker writes:
"There will still be browsers in the public domain..."
Marc VanHeyningen, U. of Indiana writes:
"Is NCSA going to continue supporting their Web products? Will they hire
new people to continue development, or kind of just let it coast? Either
way, it seems reasonable to assume that new innovations won't come from
there for some time;"
Ken Meltsner writes:
"...NCSA probably gets a revenue stream (did MCC pay for the "Mosaic"
name? The Mosaic source?), and, I believe, the original Mosaic will still
be available."
Chuck Shotton, U. of Texas writes:
"As always, when nice free/shareware goes commercial, it leaves the door
open for enterprising software authors to make a new "free" version.
This starts the cycle all over again. It's happened with other NCSA
products (Telnet->InterCon) and it'll happen with future ones as well,
I'm sure."
Christopher Gronbeck at CREST writes:
"...mosaic is going commercial...(not to take away from the outstanding
job NCSA has done in developing mosaic as far as they did!). But let's
not forget the tremendous number of individuals, schools, universities,
students, non-profit organizations, and others who can't afford to pay
much, if anything, for applications like mosaic. ... I agree with earlier
posts suggesting that some version be kept free-of-charge... I look
forward to using future releases of mosaic (including forms for the
Mac!)..."
Budi Rahardjo at U. of Manitoba writes:
"Re: mosaic becomes a commercial product."..."Marc et al. should provide
a free version of Mosaic."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Many readers have jumped to a conclusion which I must correct. MCC in no
way controls NCSA Mosaic. MCC has not even approached NCSA for a license
to NCSA Mosaic, let alone somehow gained exclusive control of the
software. NCSA Mosaic is the copyrighted property of the University of
Illinois. NCSA Mosaic will not simply "go away". NCSA Mosaic will
continue to be a fully-supported, evolving software product for the
foreseeable future. There has never been even the _suggestion_ of
reducing our commitment to NCSA Mosaic on any of our three platforms,
despite the release of commercial-grade GUI Web browsers (e.g.,
Quadralay's product), or announcements of intentions by start-up
companies.
The NCSA Mosaic that you're already very familiar with is functionally
and legally distinct from anybody else's GUI Web browser. The
differences are important, to us, anyway. But many people get confused
about them. (Note that the MCC postings cite a varitey of news articles
in praise of NCSA Mosaic!) We at NCSA are still very actively upgrading
NCSA Mosaic, and engineering new features, in consultation with a variety
of commercial firms, other research institutions, and the US government.
NCSA Mosaic will continue to be "free but copyrighted", as in the past.
Meaning no disrespect to the abilities of those who just left, the
simultaneous loss of three full-time people, and the summer loss of a
part-time undergraduate has certainly not proven to be fatal to the NCSA
Mosaic project. Rumors have unfortunately reached wrong conclusions. In
fact, development/ deployment schedules for the Mac and X platforms of
NCSA Mosaic have not been affected at all by the start-up of MCC.
The loss of Chris Wilson -- a "core team" member if there ever was one!
-- to Spry, Inc. (one of many direct competitors of MCC), and then Jon
Mittlehauser to MCC has hurt the PC/Windows platform schedule. Frankly,
it may take us until Summer to recover fully.
The emergence of Quadralay's GUI Web browser, the commercial licensing of
NCSA Mosaic by multiple firms (companies presumably in direct competition
with MCC, but who started earlier!), i.e., as of today they are: EPRI,
InfoSeek, Quarterdeck, Quadralay, SCO, Spry, Ubique, and others, with
whom I am under non-disclosure agreements, pending their initial product
announcements), and the start-up MCC are just examples of people who all
think they can build "a better mousetrap" so that customers will buy
their products.
For example, being a research department of a University, NCSA cannot
provide the level of software support like customers are used to, with
24-hour 1-800 phone numbers and the like. This is a value-added service
which commercial firms can legitimately market. Many firms either are
in, or will enter this services market. That's not news.
The commercial firms, both NCSA Mosaic licensees and others, will have to
fight it out in the marketplace to determine their market share. As I
said, MCC has not approached NCSA for a license to NCSA Mosaic source
code. Without such a license, they may not legally use the source code
of NCSA Mosaic as a baseline from which to start product development, but
would presumably have to start from scratch. Further, for your
information, assuming MCC does not license NCSA Mosaic, then NCSA, the
University of Illinois, and all of their various research arms in no way
would derive any funds whatsoever from MCC's venture. MCC is a
commercial, for-profit company. What remains to be seen is how the
market-share balance will shake out, between vendors who are already
shipping, others soon to ship, and others who started late and are just
talking.
In the mean time, NCSA Mosaic will still be evolving, and new releases
forthcoming (Mac 2.0.0a1, with Forms and Tables, and PC/Windows 2.0a5
featuring considerably less of the memory leaks you've come to know and
hate, both in about a month). We're also in the second phase of testing
with Voice Recognition, although public release will have to wait for
Apple's Speech Recognition Extention. And NCSA Mosaic still won't cost
private individuals anything!
Larry Jackson, Technical Manager for NCSA Mosaic.
Ata Etemadi
got answered. I wish you all the best of luck on your new venture.
Keep in mind that the funding for mosaic development came from the
public, and they don't deserve to be shafted in the long run.
adios
Ata <(|)>.
Joe English
Marc Andreessen <ma...@netcom13.netcom.com> wrote:
[...]
>Mosaic Communication Company's core technical staff consists of:
>
> * Virtually the entire core Mosaic technology development team from
>the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- Eric Bina,
>Chris Houck, Rob McCool, Jon Mittelhauser, and Aleks Totic -- as well as
>Lou Montulli, author of Lynx.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
OK, so everyone knows by now that Mosaic and NCSA httpd
are still in good hands; what about Lynx? Any word from
the other Lynx developers at U. Kansas?
--Joe English
Sparky
[...]
>> The process-data script could then do something like
>> remote copy this file:
>>
>> rcp [username]@[hostname]:[filename] [local-file]
>> (assuming remote copy is allowed)
>>
>> Is there a better way?
>
>indeed.
>since you're using POST method, the entire file can be sent as
>part of the input stream.
>
>only problem is, no client currently has this implemented.
>it would be simple to implement an <input name="filestream" type="file">
>which would accept a path/filename in a textfield and pipe that
>back to the server.
>even better would be a way to bring up a little mime packer
>(e.g via mpack or equivalent) to allow composition of an arbitrary mime
>message with arbitrary attachments and pipe that back to the server.
>
I'm currently programming a WWW discussion board. Problem is
as yet no browser has an editor that even deserves the name of an
editor (lynx doesn't even do text areas). Hence I wanted to use
the method of lynxexec: URLs to launch an external editor. Of course
this is spawned on the local machine and the file is edited on the
local machine and hence unavailable to the server.
Took a bit of mind warping but heres the solution: The lynxexec
launches this script:
#!/bin/sh
vi /tmp/wwwboard_article_text.$$
cat > .wwwboard_article.html <<END_ARTICLE
<head>
<title>Test Article Form</title>
</head>
<body>
Your reply: (Please test any links)<p>
END_ARTICLE
cat /tmp/wwwboard_article.$$ >> .wwwboard_article.html
cat >>.wwwboard_article.html <<END_ARTICLE
<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.cp.tn.tudelft.nl/htbin/article-post">
<INPUT NAME="article" TYPE="hidden" VALUE="
END_ARTICLE
cat >> .wwwboard_article.html <<END_ARTICLE
">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Post this reply?">
</FORM>
</body>
END_ARTICLE
rm /tmp/wwwboard_article*.$$
This creates a local html file on the users machine. The user
now selects another link from the page to post the article and it
links to this page which of course the user has access to because its
in his filespace. The Article is read over and then posted and the data
is now sent back as form info to the server. Done.
The code above is just for demonstration - it has masses of problems
that would need checking for. I plan to let the articles have links within
them so theres a bit of processing that needs to be done on the edited file.
As to security holes I can only see one obvious and thats people posting
lynexec commands within their posts. Easily checked for and removed. Anyone
see any others?
-Mark
--
_ /\/| _ _ / _ Email: ma...@cus.cam.ac.uk IRC: Brandoch
/ |_( /_/ '_/7 SnailMail: 363 Kings College, Cambridge, England
Mark Cheverton \_) Battle PBeM: finger bat...@cygnus.cp.tn.tudelft.nl
Electronic Cafe: http://www.cp.tn.tudelft.nl/~battle/mark/ecafe/ecafe.html
Brian Behlendorf
Well, at least, they got funded by the American public (and even
that is questionable).
Actually, I do wonder why NCSA didn't tackle the customer support
question head-on. Undergrads are relatively cheap to hire (I know, I
am one) - assign 3 or 4 to do nothing but answer questions related to
NCSA products and pass along real bug reports. One could specialize
in XMosaic, one in MacMosaic, one in httpd, etc. It's not research,
it's not glitzy, but it's something that would save the real research
staff headaches and time, would give those undergrads a REAL education
in customer support and knowing a particular piece of software inside
out. Meanwhile the real research team could be free to work on the
code. Yes, no one is paying NCSA for support, this is true - but no
one paid them to make the software free in the first place either, so
there's no reason to release something and not support it either.
As a counterargument, very few people could have predicted the
explosion NCSA was hit with, so they deserve some amount of slack.
But their Mosaic software is no longer at the cutting edge of
technology, and I wonder how much of that is because they simply
aren't allocating the right amount of manpower to the job.
Brian
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"They that can give up essential liberty to # br...@wired.com
obtain a little temporary safety deserve # bbe...@sfraves.stanford.edu
neither liberty nor safety" - Ben Franklin # http://www.wired.com/
Alasdair Grant (system)
>source code to NCSA Mosaic (X version, at least) will also always be
>available.
So why aren't the WinMosaic sources available? Surely not to make it
more difficult to port to OS/2?
Nathan Torkington
> Otherwise, grassroot programmers will come up with a GNU version :-)
Make sure it's Xaw based. Motif is a dog :)
Nat
(then again, Xaw isn't exactly application friendly :)
Marc Andreessen
<jac...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> writes:
... Spry, Inc. (one of many direct competitors of MCC) ...
... the commercial licensing of NCSA Mosaic by multiple firms
(companies presumably in direct competition with MCC, but who
started earlier!) ...
Larry, could you please not jump to conclusions like this in a public
forum? You do not know from whence you speak on this topic.
Thanks,
Marc
--
Marc Andreessen
Mosaic Communications Corp.
Mountain View, CA
ma...@netcom.com
R. Stewart Ellis
People continue to act like there is no other X browser, but chimera is
coming along nicely. Version 1.50 cleared up most of the gopher glitches,
1.51 cleared up a couple of http bugs, plus added proxy support. Term
sockects and SOCKS have been supported for a long time. It IS Xaw based.
It does not have all the bells and whistles, but who really needs to change
fonts while executing? My SPARC Solaris 2.1 executable is only 317K with
term support. John Kilburg should be announcing the latest version in a
couple of days if no new bugs surface.
--
R.Stewart(Stew) Ellis, Assoc.Prof., (Off)313-762-9765 ___________________
Humanities & Social Science, GMI Eng.& Mgmt. Inst. / _____ ______
Flint, MI 48504 el...@nova.gmi.edu / / / / / /
Gopher,News and modem consultant, all around hack /________/ / / / /
Chris Wilson
sy...@ucs.cam.ac.uk (Alasdair Grant (system)) writes:
>cwi...@spry.com (Chris Wilson) writes:
>>source code to NCSA Mosaic (X version, at least) will also always be
>>available.
>
>So why aren't the WinMosaic sources available? Surely not to make it
>more difficult to port to OS/2?
Actually, they are available. Look on NCSA's Web server or their FTP
server. All you have to do is fill out a form and send it in, and that's
been true since before I left. I was attempting to not speak for NCSA
directly - I don't know how swamped they've been trying to keep up with
requests.
Chris Wilson
br...@tired.wired.com (Brian Behlendorf) writes:
>Actually, I do wonder why NCSA didn't tackle the customer support
>question head-on. Undergrads are relatively cheap to hire (I know, I
>am one) - assign 3 or 4 to do nothing but answer questions related to
>NCSA products and pass along real bug reports. One could specialize
>in XMosaic, one in MacMosaic, one in httpd, etc. It's not research,
>it's not glitzy, but it's something that would save the real research
>staff headaches and time, would give those undergrads a REAL education
>in customer support and knowing a particular piece of software inside
>out. Meanwhile the real research team could be free to work on the
>code. Yes, no one is paying NCSA for support, this is true - but no
>one paid them to make the software free in the first place either, so
>there's no reason to release something and not support it either.
Actually, NCSA *has* done this, and is doing this now. However, take a
look at the dark side of hiring undergraduates... their work schedule
is often unpredictable (they'll proably disappear at midterms and finals.
:^), and hiring them for technical support is risky, because if they
aren't technical to begin with, there may be a long ramp-up time, and
if they are, chances are they will quickly find a job developing or
doing something less annoying than answering whiney email or phone
messages. :^) Also, because of restrictions placed by the University,
NCSA is not allowed to pay the students competitively, as compared to
a "real" summer internship, etc. (I had a standing offer for an
internship at TWICE what I made at NCSA as an undergrad.)
>As a counterargument, very few people could have predicted the
>explosion NCSA was hit with, so they deserve some amount of slack.
>But their Mosaic software is no longer at the cutting edge of
>technology, and I wonder how much of that is because they simply
>aren't allocating the right amount of manpower to the job.
What exactly is "at the cutting edge of technology", then? Just because
Wired thinks it's tired doesn't mean the rest of the world does. I'll
grant you, there are a few rough edges, but considering that it was
basically an unfunded project for most of its part history, it looks
pretty cool to me.
steve johnson
Phillip) wrote:
> I don't remember much that the `whingers' ever did for the MCC people. Marc & Co
> added Images to the web that turned it into a great toy and then forms that
> turned it into a usefull tool. And then an awful lot of people spent an awful
> lot of time behaving like spoilt little children.
don't know what a whinger is, but i agree with the general idea, especially
the last sentence.
--
:wq
Susan Goode
cwi...@spry.com writes:
>>Actually, I do wonder why NCSA didn't tackle the customer support
>>question head-on. Undergrads are relatively cheap to hire (I know, I
<deleted>
>
>Actually, NCSA *has* done this, and is doing this now. However, take a
>look at the dark side of hiring undergraduates... their work schedule
>is often unpredictable (they'll proably disappear at midterms and finals.
>:^), and hiring them for technical support is risky, because if
they.......
<deleted>
Thanks Chris for the words of support!
Yes, NCSA has always used undergraduates for helping out with technical
support and we have experienced all the the problems that Chris mentions.
I must say that nearly all the students we've had were hard workers and
that
we would have been in much worse shape without them. Unfortunately,
technical support funding is very hard to come by. In the past, our
resources
onl y allowed the Software Development Group to hire one full time person
to handle the technical support area. This one person was responsible
for
over twenty different software packages which had been devolped over the
past six years or so.
The recent licensing of NCSA Mosaic has actually allowed us to address
this problem for the first time! While we will be relying upon students
as heavily as we have in the past, we expect to have two additional full
time technical support staff on-line within the month. For the first
time
ever, there will be a full time staff person dedicated to the support of
NCSA Mosaic for the X Windows system. One full time staff person
is currently dedicated to the support of both the Mac and Microsoft
Windows versions. As I mentioned before, there are also students
assisting in each of these areas.
As much as we would like, it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able
to provide 24 hour responses to messages --even with the hiring of two
new full time people due to the volume of users that we have.
Rest assured that all messages are read and all bug reports, feature
requests, etc., are given to the developers.
Susan Goode
NCSA Mosaic Technical Support
HALLAM-BAKER Phillip
In article <mmcmullen-1...@taygeta.gsfc.nasa.gov>, mmcm...@gsfcmail.nasa.gov (steve johnson) writes:
|>In article <jonathan....@schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu>,
|>jona...@schenectady.ecn.purdue.edu (Jonathan L Neuenschwander) wrote:
|>
|>> My thanks to Carlos for pointing out that Mosaic is still the property of
|>> NCSA, and actually has people supporting and developing for it, and therefore
|>> is still alive, well, thriving, and free. I just read through roughly 25
|>> posts which strongly suggested otherwise.
|>
|>yeah, let's remember that "NCSA Mosaic is Copyrighted by the University of
|>Illiniois." or at least that's what it says when i open it up on my mac.
|>presumably i get similar messages on the pc and x machines i use, i'm just
|>not sitting in front of them right now. i'm no lawyer, but that tells me
|>that if you use it w/o permission or make money from it without negotiating
|>a fee they're gonna sick those green card lawyers on you (actually UI
|>probably has much better lawyers on retainer...). but - could there be
|>another mosaic, a new browser?
Yes, HTTP and HTML were developed at CERN and have been placed in the public
domain by CERN. There is a public domain interface library that is avaliable
from CERN which is in fact used by Mosaic to do communications.
What all this is going to mean is mostly good for the web:
1) More users will realise that this is a developing technology with people
contributing from arround the world. Rather than winge about things
not being as they want them they might even start trying to fix 'em
2) There will be a source of expertise for commecial companies to draw upon
to apply the web to their business.
3) Some people are going to get rich. Quoting from my Labour party membership
card "To secure for the workers the full fruits of their labours..."
If Marc and co think they are more likely to do that in a commercial
environment good luck to them. I was not aware that communism was so
popular on the net as it evidently is.
4) There is going to be a very very very long thread on Usenet that will last
even longer than the `rewrite Mosaic for tk-tcl you complete bastards'
thread.
I don't remember much that the `whingers' ever did for the MCC people. Marc & Co
added Images to the web that turned it into a great toy and then forms that
turned it into a usefull tool. And then an awful lot of people spent an awful
lot of time behaving like spoilt little children.
--
Phillip M. Hallam-Baker
Not Speaking for anyone else.
Daniel LaLiberte
I'm currently programming a WWW discussion board. Problem is
as yet no browser has an editor that even deserves the name of an
editor (lynx doesn't even do text areas).
The Emacs w3 browser uses Emacs as the editor. Can't get much better than
that, for a generic text editor.
Hence I wanted to use
the method of lynxexec: URLs to launch an external editor.
...
This creates a local html file on the users machine. The user
now selects another link from the page to post the article and it
links to this page which of course the user has access to because its
in his filespace. The Article is read over and then posted and the data
is now sent back as form info to the server. Done.
This sounds very much like what I have planned for HyperNews. What
HyperNews already has is a tree of responses for each article and response.
It still needs an easy way to enter articles locally. Perhaps we should
work together on this. Check out HyperNews at:
http://ginko.cecer.army.mil:8000/hypernews/hypernews.html
Dan LaLiberte
lib...@cs.uiuc.edu
(Fight interface copyrights and software patents.
Join the League for Programming Freedom: l...@uunet.uu.net)
John Connolly
Marc> In article <2qq8c4$c...@hermes.uni-konstanz.de>
Marc> di...@theoris.rz.uni-konstanz.de (Dierk Lucyga) writes:
Marc> At least we have good counter measures on the net. Set up a cronjob
Marc> that sends the bible (just because its sooo big) every five
Marc> minutes.... I heard the this "green-card weirdo" got megabytes of
Marc> mailbombing so that his service had to close down for some time.
Marc> They kicked him out.
Marc> ...and he and his wife are now "considering suing some of their Usenet
Marc> detractors for defamation of character", according to the New York
Marc> Times. Ms. Siegel says, "I think there are going to be suits, and
Marc> they well may come from us."
Marc> So watch it! <stern look>
Marc> A lawyer-lover who would never ever EVER even THINK about mailbombing
Marc> a lawyer, and will definitely vote for lawyer Dan Quayle for president
Marc> in '96 to boot,
The "green-card" people are also said to be considering creating a service
to help others flood the net with inappropriate advertisements, or so says
the Wall Street Journal (earlier this week).
--
John Connolly, EDS
jcon...@cps.plnin.gmeds.com
Thomas Boutell
They are available. Only to academic institutions, however.
-T
Larry W. Virden
practice of various operators of large backbone like systems
refusing to pass email to or from certain sites. It has no relationship
to real life 'deaths' of any sort.
--
:s Great net resources sought...
:s Larry W. Virden INET: lvi...@cas.org
:s Personal: 674 Falls Place, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068-1614
The task of an educator should be to irrigate the desert not clear the forest.
Meng Weng Wong
| Note that references to the internet death sentence refer to the
| practice of various operators of large backbone like systems
| refusing to pass email to or from certain sites. It has no relationship
| to real life 'deaths' of any sort.
"The Internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it."
- John Gilmore
Censorship goes both ways; with any luck, the Canter and
Siegel episode will expedite the subtle shift of our medium
from its present wholly libertarian nature to a more mature
and socially responsible attitude.
The Internet is rife with Acceptable Use Policies; but, as
one is often reminded, Usenet is not the Internet. This is
one of those times when we are forcefully reminded of the
difference.
Meng Weng Wong
meng...@seas.upenn.edu
canter & siegel vs. mosaic communications: a case study in advertising
Larry W. Virden
Phillip J. Windley <win...@cs.byu.edu> wrote:
:
:In article <2qq8c4$c...@hermes.uni-konstanz.de> di...@theoris.rz.uni-konstanz.de (Dierk Lucyga) writes:
:
: At least we have good counter measures on the net. Set up a cronjob that
: sends the bible (just because its sooo big) every five minutes....
: I heard the this "green-card weirdo" got megabytes of mailbombing so that
: his service had to close down for some time. They kicked him out.
:
:Sorry, this is not exactly the proper forum, but if we're going to stop
:this kind of thing, we need to do it right.
:
:Yes, the service was closed down, but the green card weirdo's considered it
:a success and are now selling packets telling others how to do the same
:thing!
:
:The right thing to do is to give them too many false positives so that they
:have to expend resources to sift the real responses from the false positive
:responses. If you send them garbage, its too easy to sift. Make them
:spend lots of money for nothing and they'll stop.
:
Since this isn't really WWW related, it really should be redirected - anyone
know where?
Anyways, according an abstract from Edupage this week of Wall Street Journal
5/9/94, B2, Canter and Siegel are starting a new service, Cybersell, to
help lots of others do the same thing. The quote from Siegel was:
"Our fate has been that
we're making a lot of money. If a bunch of hysterics want to scream and
yell and make fools of themselves, then I don't feel they warrant respect."
Sounds like it is time to issue the internet death sentence to me.
Alan Richmond
>Censorship goes both ways; with any luck, the Canter and
>Siegel episode will expedite the subtle shift of our medium
>from its present wholly libertarian nature to a more mature
>and socially responsible attitude.
Could somebody please summarise this episode? Thanks.
Alan Richmond @ NASA/GSFC/HEASARC rich...@guinan.gsfc.nasa.gov
HALLAM-BAKER Phillip
In article <1994May12.2...@chemabs.uucp>, lw...@cas.org (Larry W. Virden) writes:
|>Sounds like it is time to issue the internet death sentence to me.
Why what have <em>you</em> done?
Dave Hodgkinson
ma...@netcom13.netcom.com "Marc Andreessen" writes:
>Hello from Mountain View,
Given that the NCSA, Spry and Mosaic have explained their
respective positions and everyone (almost) seems reasonably
content with the world, would it be a good idea to paste the
various manifestos into the FAQ ?
--
Dave - Real-Time Spreadsheets 'R' Us
Alan Richmond
>Rest assured that all messages are read and all bug reports, feature
>requests, etc., are given to the developers.
Can I ask *PLEASE* for an acknowledgement policy to be implemented?
Several weeks ago I reported a set of conditions that crash Mosaic for
X, and followed it up with further clues as I discovered them. I have
never received any reply to these e-mails. The bug is one that
severely limits the usability of my product.
Alan Richmond
>Erm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but are commercial activities on the Internet
>suddenly smiled upon? It sounds very much like you know what you're doing,
>but I can't say I've ever seen an Internet server dedicated to the commercial
>aspects of electronic communication (short of Compu$erve, and that doesn't
>really count). Mind explaining where the loophole lies?
Long vacation, was it?
Philip Thrift
>
>The "green-card" people are also said to be considering creating a service
>to help others flood the net with inappropriate advertisements, or so says
>the Wall Street Journal (earlier this week).
>--
I can see how they can flood USENET, but not WWW.
-pt
William M. Eldridge
Well we've survived the onslaught of Serdar Argic,
so we've definitely seen worse. It should be noted
that the original Green Card posting took up 1/1000th
of the total bandwidth involved. The other 99.9% was
from traffic generated by net outrage. Every couple
of months, someone posts some sort of pyramid scam
to the the net, we all holler, and the person retracts,
gets his account taken away, or in some other way gets
blasted. Life goes on.
Or is it our worry that lawyers have entered Cyberspace?
--
Bill Eldridge.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:Projects: routers that will route
bi...@lifesci.ucla.edu \ /\ /\ /\ / servers that will serve
310-206-3960 (3987 fax) / \/ \/ \/ \ mailers that will mail
Ich bin auch Dagoberter.:.:.:..:..:.:.:.& modems that will mode
Thomas Boutell
Dave Hodgkinson <da...@fusion.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>In article <MARCA.94M...@netcom13.netcom.com>
> ma...@netcom13.netcom.com "Marc Andreessen" writes:
>
>>Hello from Mountain View,
>
>Given that the NCSA, Spry and Mosaic have explained their
>respective positions and everyone (almost) seems reasonably
>content with the world, would it be a good idea to paste the
>various manifestos into the FAQ ?
I'm not sure if I want to turn it into the Babs' Babylon Scandal Sheet. (:
I'm not going to put the lengthy blurbs of each company in the FAQ.
I probably will, however, put in a simple answer to a simple
question: "I heard a bunch of people left NCSA. Is Mosaic dead?"
(Answer: NO.) That's the only question on this thread that's
truly recurring, I think (besides things that are answered
in news.announce.newusers, which ALL OF US should read once in
a while no matter HOW long we've been here because the net
doesn't stand still). Dumb perennial questions like "you
mean commercial use of the Internet doesn't result in
instantaneous self-immolation?"
Bill Madden
Kim Stephenson <ki...@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>NCSA. In Marc's original note he cites a number of articles that were
>written explicitly about NCSA Mosaic leading one to believe that they
>were written about either MCC or the people themselves. This is
>misleading. In addition he states that "Virtually the entire core
>Mosaic technology development team" has moved to MCC, I like Chris
>Wilson take exception to this statement. Although Marc, Eric, Jon, and
>Aleks were important to and key players in the development of Mosaic,
>NO single person (or even a small number) can take sole credit for this
>monster. Like MOST projects of this magnitude it was a collection of
>thoughts, ideas, brainstorming sessions, technical support, document
>creation, server creation and support from a lot of people. And
>without the WEB and CERN there wouldn't be a Mosaic.
As the Mosaic World Turns.
Wm
http://www.tx.ncsu.edu/html/directory/wpmadden.html - No commercial breaks
William M. Eldridge
>know where?
Kind of like toxic waste - no one else wants it either.
Might as well bury it here.
Frank Teusink
now see commercial gain in developing Web browsers etc, means that NSCA has
fullfilled what I see as the main part of their job: developing new
technologies up to the point where companies can comercialize them. I don't
think University funds are meant to be spent in maintaining/extending any
given system indefinitely, just to provide people with the latest
state-of-the-art software, without having to pay its proper price.
Personally, I think WWW and Mosaic have a great future. I just want to
congratulate NSCA with the fact that their Mosaic was/is to a great extend
responsible for letting people see the commercial value of it, wich ensures
its development in the future, even if (somewhere in the far future) NSCA
would have to stop its participation.
Regards,
Frank Teusink
Ian Hoyle
> Although, IMHO, Marc et al. should provide a free version of Mosaic.
> Otherwise, grassroot programmers will come up with a GNU version :-)
I hope they adopt the model of Steve Dorner (author of Eudora, a
*wonderful* Macintosh, and now PC, POP mail client) in that
- Eudora was developed while he was at an academic institution (UIUC??)
- he left to join Qualcomm where it has now been commercialised **but**
Steve insisted that a freeware version without the "bells and whistles"
would always be available for the net.citizens.
Perhaps this could be done with Mosaic for the supported platforms??
ian
--
/\/\ : Ian Hoyle, Senior Research Scientist
/ / /\ : BHP Research - Melbourne Laboratories
/ / / \ : 245 Wellington Rd, Mulgrave, 3170, AUSTRALIA
/ / / /\ \ : Phone +61-3-560-7066
\ \/ / / / : E-mail ia...@resmel.bhp.com.au
\ / / / :
\/\/\/ : "perl - the swiss army chainsaw of UNIX tools"
: -- Rob Kolstad
Carlos Pero
I may be wrong, but I'm guessing that at least SOME of the people departing
happen to be graduating now as well....they're SUPPOSED to go get another job!
--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Carlos A. Pero | Currently serving time at
pe...@aps.anl.gov | Argonne National Laboratory
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
<A HREF="http://wwa.com:1111/">Virtual MeetMarket</A>
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Dimm
------------------------
I know it must be hectic at NCSA, MCC, EPRI, InfoSeek,
Quarterdeck, Quadralay, SCO, Spry, and Ubique, but are any
of you ready to talk about your plans for enhancements? In
particular, plans for improved communication between Mosaic
and external viewers? In Windows, Mosaic passes non-HTML
data to an external viewer by
1. downloading the foreign data to a local disk file, then
2. executing the viewer with the filename as command-line
parameter.
This is nice and simple. But as far as I can tell, there's
no facility yet for the viewer to turn around and tell
Mosaic to go to a new URL.
This capability would enable all sorts of wonderful add-ons:
virtual listboxes, vector-based graphics with hotspots, game
interfaces. And there are some very easy (although
platform-dependent) ways to make this happen.
Which one of you will be the first?
-John Dimm
jd...@eb.com
Garrett Blythe
: In article <MARCA.94M...@netcom13.netcom.com>,
: Marc Andreessen <ma...@netcom13.netcom.com> wrote:
: [...]
: >Mosaic Communication Company's core technical staff consists of:
: >
: > * Virtually the entire core Mosaic technology development team from
: >the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) -- Eric Bina,
: >Chris Houck, Rob McCool, Jon Mittelhauser, and Aleks Totic -- as well as
: >Lou Montulli, author of Lynx.
: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
: OK, so everyone knows by now that Mosaic and NCSA httpd
: are still in good hands; what about Lynx? Any word from
: the other Lynx developers at U. Kansas?
Lynx, eh? I wish MCC was named Lynx Communication Company so I could
get lots of dead beat messages. This thread, most of it, is ridiculous; as
if we all won't profit from what the Web has, is, and will offer us in the
future regardless of who provides the tools.
Congratulations to MCC! I very much hope that Lou Montulli makes
millions. He has been a great asset to me in my development of DosLynx
and in my understanding of Lynx version 2.3. I hope everyone understands that
Lynx, though copyright of KU, is Lou Montulli's contribution, thus far, to the
WWW. I'd like to see what's next from Lou and MCC.
Lynx will continue. Lynx has yet to have a good competitor for vt100;
don't know of any others. If these companies began to realize the open market
in this arena, I only hope that they won't hesitate to begin development on
thier own client; same for DOS. I view compitition as good, that's all.
And for those with hard feelings, I suggest getting over it. It's
getting you and me (because I have to wade through your definsive posts)
nowhere fast.
Dzai Jyan,
Garrett.
Trodden Soil
I am trodden soil.
Dust covers my face.
Soles crush my nature
Revealing a hard empty space.
Garrett Arch Blythe (913)864-0465
User Services Student Programmer/Consultant
University of Kansas Computer Center
Jon P. Knight
>
>Or is it our worry that lawyers have entered Cyberspace?
>
In the Internet lawyers will be viewed as damage and be routed around. :-)
Jon
--
<A HREF="http://hill.lut.ac.uk/People/jon.html"> Jon Knight </A>
* Its not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important. *
Chris Wilson
>Mosaic as URL dispatcher
>------------------------
>I know it must be hectic at NCSA, MCC, EPRI, InfoSeek,
>Quarterdeck, Quadralay, SCO, Spry, and Ubique, but are any
>of you ready to talk about your plans for enhancements? In
>particular, plans for improved communication between Mosaic
>and external viewers? ...
>
>Which one of you will be the first?
Well, we're working on this... and we're currently preparing our projected
first-release feature list, which we'll be sharing publicly. As far as
future enhancement goes, obviously that's a little more private, but I'd
be happy to discuss specific requests (like this) with anyone.
-Chris Wilson
WWW Product Development Lead
Spry, Inc.
cwi...@spry.com
John Dimm
for starting a new thread on this subject.
I realize that a public forum is not the place to discuss
budding product plans, but I would like to take this just
one small step further here. There are many levels of
inter-process communication. Mosaic now implements a
primitive but effective form of IPC when it runs an external
viewer. There is an equally primitive method for supplying
a return path from the viewer to Mosaic.
In order to function as an external viewer for Mosaic, an
app has to follow one rule:
Take a filename as command-line parameter. Read the file
to create a main window displaying an object constructed
from the data contained in the file.
To avoid an unwanted proliferation of windows, there is
a second optional rule:
Respond to a re-execution (a request for another instance)
by replacing the contents of the current instance's main
window with the new object.
I would be very satisfied in the short term if Mosaic itself
would conform to these rules. Then my viewer could send a
URL back to Mosaic by doing a WinExec of Mosaic and passing
the URL as parameter. If you follow the second rule, you
avoid the coding problem of handling multiple instances of
Mosaic, and it's what we want anyway.
(Note that this implies a minor deviation from the standard
Mosaic viewer: instead of a filename, the parameter is a
URL. Mosaic itself does not quite become a Mosaic viewer.
If anybody cares, this could easily be done by adding tags
to the command line options: "mosaic -fmyfile.html", and
"mosaic -uhttp://www.acme.com".)
In this scenario, Mosaic and the viewer execute each other,
bouncing URLs and filenames back and forth, but to the user
it looks like the two apps are actually communicating. The
viewer can even send a URL to itself, or to another viewer,
by the intermediary of Mosaic, which could remain iconized
while it downloads the URL and executes the viewer. Mosaic
becomes a URL dispatcher which also happens to work as an
HTML viewer.
Does this make sense? Is it harder than it seems? Or is it
already implemented, and I'm just ignorant of the
command-line syntax?
PS. I just found out about the Remote Control feature of
the X version. That looks like it will do this and more.
Any plans to implement this for Mac and Windows?
-John Dimm
jd...@eb.com
Timothy C. May
: Before people start to get upset about the "death" of public domain
: Mosaic, just consider these two words:
: Microsoft Mosaic.
: <shudder>
: It could be worse. Much worse.
You didn't see these announcements, I take it?
Redmond, WA, AP...May 11. Microsoft announced today "MicroMosaic," a
WWW browser written entirely in Visual Basic. Chairman William Gates
III described MicroMosaic as being the Next Big Thing in cyberspace.
"We are proud to introduce this technology as part of our joint
marketing arrangement with Prodigy.".... (rest elided)
....
Redmond, WA, AP...May 13. Microsoft is seeking programmers proficient
in Visual Basic to write its next major application, MicroMosaic....
(rest elided)
In the best tradition of the computer business, first they announce
it, then they hire the programmers to write it.
(Note to Microsoft lawyers and others: The preceeding was a satire,
not meant as an insult to Microsoft, Bill Gates, or Mosaic. While I
can't presently use Mosaic--being on a non-SLIP connection to
Netcom--I am thrilled with Lynx.)
--Tim May
--
..........................................................................
Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tc...@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments.
Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available.
"National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Kevin Laws
|> Casey Barton (cba...@clark.dgim.doc.ca) wrote:
|>
|> : Before people start to get upset about the "death" of public domain
|> : Mosaic, just consider these two words:
|>
|> : Microsoft Mosaic.
|>
|> : <shudder>
|>
|> : It could be worse. Much worse.
|>
|> You didn't see these announcements, I take it?
|>
|> Redmond, WA, AP...May 11. Microsoft announced today "MicroMosaic," a
|> WWW browser written entirely in Visual Basic. Chairman William Gates
|> III described MicroMosaic as being the Next Big Thing in cyberspace.
|> "We are proud to introduce this technology as part of our joint
|> marketing arrangement with Prodigy.".... (rest elided)
|>
Umm...I think Tim May thinks he's joking. While they didn't announce
MicroMosaic, they DID announce (at least according to the most recent
issue of Wired) something called "Tiger", their WWW browser for Windows.
So go ahead and be afraid. No need to disclaim it as "satire".
Kevin Laws (ke...@oc3s-emh1.army.mil)
Stephen Baxendale
The discussions following the announcement of the formation of MCC have been interesting.
There seems to be an underlying fear that the Internet will suffer from commercial interest
in it. I do not think this will happen. The Internet will continue to evolve and support its
community of users. However the thirst for knowledge that users have is often overcome when
presented with the Internet "red in tooth and claw" for the first time. For some users the
Internet will never be approachable. It is just too big. For these, the vast warehouse of
data needs to be brought down to the size of a retail store with a friendly face, a
consistent brand image and a degree of reliability. For this people will pay. The profits
made by the likes of Compuserve and America Online are testament to this.
The WWW was conceived as a means of producing a "distributed collaborative information
system". The browsers that have been developed still retain this core purpose. The
development of Mosaic added presentation elements to this information system. Publishers of
information started to concern themselves with the look of their published work. And it
worked. This enhanced presentation caught the imagination of the users and it also caught the
attention of the press. In the UK Mosaic has featured in Tomorrows World (a BBC program
looking at innovations) and several newspapers and magazines. This interest was not just
because WWW was a fine way of distributing information but because that information was also
good to look at. Whilst many of the purists will argue that HTML is not a presentation
medium, that has not stopped people from producing some elegant documents. Like it or not,
form is important. Magazines spend a lot of money and effort in producing the design of the
magazine and in keeping that look.
Whilst the Internet continues to use WWW then browsers will continue to spring up and
existing browsers continue to be developed (thanks NCSA).
What will happen is that private information systems will see the power of tools like Mosaic.
These organisations may wish to develop information systems based on this type of client
software. Companies like MCC can capitalise on this desire by providing the tools to meet
this demand. These clients may then be "given" away as part of the service (like the razor
marketing ploy).
These information services will then have to supply information that meets the needs of the
target audience. This information must be well presented, be easy to access and the service
must be a pleasure to use. Fewer and fewer people are willing to wrestle with systems that
prevent them from achieving their goals. If information providers fail at the front, then no
amount of content will save them. Of course if they have unique, exclusive and valuable
content, then they may be able to get away with a poor presentation initially, at the cost of
user resentment.
For this reason content providers would be wise not to tie up their content in exclusive
deals. Rather they should be dispensing this content to the information retailers. I believe
it will be the information retailers who will drive the direction of companies like MCC et
al. Without them these tools are just so much electronic junk.
So I do not think Internet users have anything to fear from the commercial developments
taking place. Indeed there could well be a benefit to the community from the development work
these companies will have to do to firm up standards.
There is money to be made in this area and I wish those at all the companies involved in this
area well.
Stephen Baxendale
William M. Eldridge
Or you could just have special routers to use only
for lawyers - what say the ones you keep in your machine shop?
William M. Perry
> Lynx will continue. Lynx has yet to have a good competitor
>for vt100; don't know of any others.
LineMode browser (ugh) and emacs-w3 both run on dumb terminals.
Emacs-w3 also now supports the same highlighting as lynx (bold,
underlined, etc) if you are using emacs 19. It also runs under DOS,
Windows, Xwindows, NeXTstep, OS/2 PM, and the Macintosh, with a
consistent interface/feature set on all platforms. The DOS and
Windows versions should have complete networking support soon.
-Bill P.
ObPlug: Everyone grab lemacs 19.10 when it comes out and try the new
inlined MPEG code in emacs-w3 :)