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June 13, 1994

Updated Mosaic said to ease Internet access

This portion of a World Wide Web document form the Internet Shopping Network illustrates both the use of interactive prompts or buttons and hyperlinked text that can be moved from page to page or server to server.

By Ellis Booker

As any brave soul who has cruised the Internet will tell you, this vast sea of information, news and trivia is often maddeningly difficult to navigate.

Enter Mosaic, the most popular of a number of graphical front-end tools for accessing resources on the Internet.

Point and click

Developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Mosaic offers point-and-click access to the World Wide Web (WWW), a subset of some 2,300 Internet servers that feature hyperlinked multimedia documents. The WWW is the fastest-growing Internet information service.

"Mosaic is a single-client program that can talk with and present the resources without having you switch to different types of server programs," said Daniel P. Dern, an Internet expert in Newton Center, Mass., and author of Internet Guide for New Users.

"It's not the universal remote for the Internet, but it's close," he said.

Mosaic is free for the taking from numerous WWW servers. NCSA estimates there are more than a million Mosaic users to date; more than 30,000 copies of the front end are downloaded each month. But, as Dern noted, the tool was never "productized" by NCSA.

The main goal

Making Mosaic the sort of shrink-wrapped item that computer and software companies will feel comfortable bundling into their products is the goal of Spyglass, Inc. in Savoy, Ill.

Earlier this month at the Internet World show in San Jose, Calif., Spyglass and NCSA announced an agreement whereby Spyglass will develop a "commercially enhanced" version of Mosaic. NCSA will continue to maintain a public-with-copyright version of Mosaic.

Digital Equipment Corp. simultaneously announced that it will bundle the Spyglass Mosaic with all its computer systems. Digital is believed to be the first computer maker to do this, although Spyglass confirms it is talking with other OEMs.

According to a Spyglass spokeswoman, the development effort will yield a cleaner code that uses less memory and looks consistent across different operating systems. The current Mosaic is available on X Window System/Unix, Windows, Macintosh and Amiga.

The good points

"It'll also be easier to install and have on-line hypertext based help and on-line documentation for creating a WorldWideWeb server," the spokeswoman said. Another enhancement will be forms support so that an order entry form for a WWW server, for example, can be filled out by a customer from a Mosaic-attached workstation.

Mosaic from Spyglass will be available for Windows and Macintosh platforms this month and for X Window computers next month.

Running Mosaic

Mosaic is a client or browsing tool for multimedia documents created and stored on the World Wide Web. It is available for X Window/Unix, Windows, Macintosh and Amiga.

Unfortunately, to get the real feel for real-time networked multimedia via Mosaic, a TCP/IP connection to the Internet of at least 56Kbit/sec. is recommended.

- Ellis Booker

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