NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows User's Guide

Introduction


NCSA Mosaic, a World Wide Web browser, is a networked information discovery and retrieval tool developed by the Software Development Group (SDG) at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Those are the facts of the matter, but to understand what NCSA Mosaic can do for you, you have to broaden the horizon a bit.

The World Wide Web (the Web) is a portion of the Internet designed for the dissemination of hypermedia material. But the Web is more than just a computer network; it is that network plus the vast store of information those computers can access. NCSA Mosaic allows you to browse the information available on the Web much as you would browse the shelves of a research library. You can coast through material quickly or stop to delve into topics that look particularly interesting. And just like the information at the public library, the information on the Web is useful for the casual reader and the serious scientist or researcher.

NCSA Mosaic is also more than a Web browser; it provides a portal to most of the major server types on the Internet: HTTP servers (the standard server on the Web), FTP servers, Gopher servers, and WAIS servers. With this capability, you can access files on virtually any of the major servers on the Internet. Returning to the library analogy, if browsing the Web from a single home page is like browsing a research library, browsing the Internet with NCSA Mosaic, taking full advantage of all its server interface capabilities, is like browsing several of the world's greatest research libraries ... all at once ... from your desk.


National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-win@ncsa.uiuc.edu