NCSA Mosaic - the ultimate Internet Surfboard

Jan 3 17:51 UTC 1994

NCSA Mosaic is a client program for WWW (World-Wide_Web).

I would love to have anyone who has experienced this to add to what
I know about it. My understanding is that WWW brings together all
of the internet protocols into a meta-protocol. If this is true,
a client program for it would be capable of replacing client
programs for all of the other protocols.

I do not know for certain which client platforms Mosaic has been
ported to, but I certainly do know that there is a Mac version. It
can be found (as I recall) in /afs/umich.edu/group/itd/mac/util/comm
or by ftp from mac.archive@umich.edu in util/comm

It requires MacTCP, of course, and if your Mac is not on the
internet, you must gain access via a LAP/mdev like PPP.
Anonymous PPP will not cut it for using this program, so I am out of
luck and have never used it and cannot tell you how cool it is.

I have posted this partially because rcurl prompted me to do so, and
partially in hopes that someone (perhaps even rcurl) will get a
copy and go surfing with it. If anyone does this, or has used it,
please post any comments they have.

By the way, we will not see a Mosaic program here on Grex, because
you need a full graphic interface. (Maybe one day when we all dial
into a PowerPC 620 - based Grex via ISDN lines and all use X servers.) 

response 2 of 104:

Jan 8 00:30 UTC 1994

I guess I was assuming you had a color Mac with high-speed internet
connection in your office. Sorry.

response 4 of 104:

Jan 9 05:26 UTC 1994

drool

(srw slinks away convinced he has contributed to the delinquency of
 a chem-E prof.)

response 6 of 104:

Jan 9 15:47 UTC 1994

Rane, how are you connected to the internet?  Through Grex or through
the University?  I was under the impression that Mosaic requires a
direct connection.  I'm guessing that Mosaic is not accessible through
Grex--do you know if that's right?

response 8 of 104:

Jan 10 06:00 UTC 1994

I have MichNet access by virtue of being a UM employee. My powerbook
becomes a host on the Internet by virtue of dialing in with MacPPP. I
even get assigned an IP number when I sign on -though its different
each time. 

response 10 of 104:

Jan 11 16:33 UTC 1994

I was playing on mosaic, and encountered a limit on what I can do: my
PB has "only" 4MB RAM, and System take 2MB, and Mosaic 2MB, so no
viewers will open. I suppose I could load only MacTCP, MacPPP and prefs,
and recover a little from INITS - but it looks like one needs a machine
with 8MB RAM for really surfing mosaic.

response 12 of 104:

Jan 12 07:06 UTC 1994

Thank you. I had completely forgotten about virtual memory, since I have
not had any need for it previously (even though I had seen mention of
it in the manual - it said it slowed things down, so of course I didn't
want *that*.) I guess the time has come.

response 14 of 104:

Jan 12 14:25 UTC 1994

Interesting. The manual says in one place to use VM only when the power
adapter is plugged in, and in another place that VM reduces battery life,
and in neither place why. But I don't see the connection with using a
cellular phone for surfing - a cordless phone, maybe ;->.

response 16 of 104:

Jan 13 07:29 UTC 1994

I am back (temporarily) from another trip into the m o s a i c .. ..
Virtual memory broke the jam. It is difficult to know where to even
browse. Randomly, I guess. I spent a little while wondering around the
natural history museum at UC Berkeley. The images are pointilistic -
fair, but not scientific, representations. However including the images
makes things really slow, over just 14.4KBps and MacPPP, so I turned off
the image downloads, and went looking for interesting text. There is
a large section of university gophers to choose among, but when I tried
to open one, it said it could not open Telnet - good heavens, Telnet too
over Mosaic. My Telent is Versaterm, so its no wonder it couldn't open
it. Looks like another download - of NCSA Telnet. Is there a Mosaic
Guru here, to provide hyperguidance, for us as yet enlightened mosaics?

response 18 of 104:

Jan 14 07:27 UTC 1994

I downloaded NCSA Telnet 2.5.1B, but haven't read all the little docs
that came with it (600K worth). I use it at the office, but haven't
learned its configuration stuff. What are the minimum set of instructions
for a) configuring for MacPPP, and b) creating a sessions file? (I learned
that one can use other Telnet tools in Mosaic, from one of the menus,
but haven't looked at that yet).
,

response 20 of 104:

Apr 5 13:22 UTC 1994

Its been a while. But the time was ripe, so I got on my board and took
off down the Mosaic trails. I started out with no particular objective
in mind, but found a page listing hypertext maps, but Michigan wasn't
among them, so I settled for New York. The full-page map showed the
location of all SUNY sites, so I found Oneonta, where I know someone,
and looked around there. I noticed a lead to IRS tax forms, so browsed
that, and settled on a 2688 (extension of time to file), which we need.
It was only 2 pages, but 89Kbs, and arrived in *PDF format*, whatever
that is. There was a little apology in the list header, about the less
than friendly format. Does anyone here know how to decode this into the
form? Here are the first few lines of the file, opened in WORD 5.1a:

%PDF-1.0 
19 0 obj
/Length 20 0 R
/Filter [ /ASCII85Decode /LZWDecode  ]

There was some code that was untranslatable to ASCII, which did not
come through there, and some translations, but it gives the general idea.

response 22 of 104:

May 25 13:28 UTC 1994

No, they are just serial modems. However anyone at the U can get an
account to MichNet - and there are other local SLIP or PPP providers,
though that starts to cost money. 

response 24 of 104:

May 26 03:59 UTC 1994

Steve, so I can understand this better, what would Grex have to get
to offer PPP internet access?