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New "XMosaic" World-Wide Web browser from NCSA

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Tim Berners-Lee

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Jan 29, 1993, 7:22:43 AM1/29/93
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An exciting new World-Wide Web browser has come out, written by Marc
Andreessen of NCSA. Using X/Motif, and full of good features, it
installs very easily, as the binary is completely self-sufficient.

The release note is appended to this message. The sources and
binaries are available by anonymous FTP from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu
as described below, and also from info.cern.ch as files

/pub/www/src/xmosaic-0.5.tar.Z The sources

/pub/www/bin/decstation/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (ultrix)
/pub/www/bin/sun4/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (sun4)
/pub/www/bin/snake/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (hp 700)
/pub/www/bin/sgi/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (sgi)
/pub/www/bin/rs6000/xmosaic_0.5.Z binary (ibm rs6000)

- Tim Berners-Lee WWW project CERN ti...@info.cern.ch
_________________________________________________________________

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 07:21:17 -0800
From: ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version
0.5 of NCSA's Motif-based networked information systems and World
Wide
Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/xmosaic-0.5.tar.Z

This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:

SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).

Binaries for these platforms are available on ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.5. More binaries will be supplied as I am
able to find other Motif-configured platforms to use (DEC MIPS
probably within the next half hour).

Although this is alpha/beta software, I'm looking more for feedback
on
design and functionality than bug reports right now -- down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don't
take
the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too.
New
releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.

A list of current and future capabilities of X Mosaic follows this
message.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
ma...@ncsa.uiuc.edu


Current capabilities
..................

Motif interface.
Multiple toplevel windows.
Save/mail/print document (plaintext or HTML).
Document source- and URL-viewing windows.
History list per window with GUI interface.
Option for new window per document (TurboGopher interface).
On-the-fly font selection.
Many common document choices accessible via menubar.
Keyword search capability.
Hotlist capability -- keep list of interesting documents,
add/remove items, list is persistent across sessions.
Smart handling of documents too big for single X window --
virtual document pages via inlined hypertext.
Interruptable at any time via SIGUSR1 signal.
No config or resource file installation required;
self-contained executable.
Hypertext help.
Integration with NCSA Collage and NCSA DTM to broadcast documents
into real-time networked workgroup collaboration sessions.
Stable! :-)


Future capabilities
.................

Multimedia/MIME.
Asynchronous collaboration functionality.
(annotations, references, revision control).
Hypermedia interface to scientific data.
Visual hyperweb/hierarchy layout and navigation.
3D/immersive interface.
???

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