Click. Click. See an exhibit of dinosaur fossils on your computer screen. Click. Click. Listen to a half-hour speech by F.W. DeKlerk to the National Press Club. Click. Click. Watch a short movie showing the path of last year's Hurricane Bob.
The age of a global information network arrived some time ago, but few noticed, because there was no easy way to navigate through the nearly 10 terabytes of information--about 10,000 times more data than is found on a typical PC hard disk--that is publicly available on the Internet computer network.
NCSA Mosaic, the latest software offering from NCSA's Software Development Group, opens a portal to this cornucopia with a few clicks of the mouse.
Click. Click. Read the text of a recent Supreme Court decision. Click. Click. Examine the latest satellite picture from the U.S. Weather Service. Click. Click. Browse through the electronic version of access.
Built atop the World Wide Web technology developed by CERN (the high-energy physics laboratory in Switzerland), NCSA Mosaic is, in essence, HyperCard on a global scale. Each phrase highlighted in blue is a link pointing to related information, which can include text, images, sounds, and video sequences. For example, clicking on the words "dinosaur exhibit" could send you zipping through cyberspace to the exhibit on dinosaur fossils put together at Honolulu Community College.
"Mosaic is turning hypermedia into a medium that can be practically used," says Marc Andreessen, NCSA programmer of the X Window System version of Mosaic. "It's kind of like a '90s NCSA Telnet. Instead of logging into another computer, all of these computers on the network are able to give you information."
NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System was released in April. Since then, 5,000 copies a month have been downloaded from NCSA's anonymous ftp server. By the time you read this, Version 2.0 should be available, as should versions for the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows.
NCSA Mosaic offers access to the more than 200 World Wide Web Servers, approximately 1,000 Gopher servers, and thousands of ftp servers, as well as WAIS databases and more obscure protocols. One of the greatest advantages of Mosaic, though, is that it combines all of these varied information servers into one unified information space. (That is, one rarely needs to know more than "click on the colored text" to effectively use the software.) In addition, Mosaic's Annotations feature enables one to attach personal notes to a document.
Applications for this new technology are still in the discovery stage. The National Consortium for High Performance Computing plans a Digital Library and Informations Systems Testbed, which will include such projects as an online library of medical images for the Human Genome and Human Brain Projects, archives of data from environmental monitoring satellites, and large datasets for social science research. Mosaic could be the software of choice for the testbed.
"NCSA Mosaic is driving the next stage of evolution of the global Internet," says Joseph Hardin, head of the NCSA Software Development Group. "What emerges will be a new form of life online."
NCSA Mosaic is available via anonymous ftp from NCSA's ftp server.
This software is free for individual use, but is copyrighted by the University of Illinois. NCSA and the University of Illinois retain rights to restrict the modification and redistribution of this software.
NOTE: The Macintosh and PC-Windows versions of NCSA Mosaic were released in November 1993. Both versions are available on the NCSA Anonymous FTP server. Please read the copyright information.