NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows User's Guide
In late 1992 and early 1993, NCSA staff members were looking for a
way to make the information on the Internet more accessible to the
average computer user. The search for tools that would lend themselves
to the sort of graphical, point-and-click interface that has proven
so effective over the past decade led eventually to the World Wide
Web and HTML.
The World Wide Web is a large-scale networked hypertext information
system initially developed at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle
Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1989. The Web was designed for
hypermedia information distribution and to take advantage of developing
standards for hypertext markup, hypermedia distribution, and information
locators:
- HTML
- HyperText Markup Language, an SGML-based markup language that includes
provisions for rich-text formatting, hyperlinks, inline graphics,
and external viewers (for data formats that cannot be handled internally
by the viewer software)
- HTTP
- HyperText Transfer Protocol, a fast, lightweight transfer protocol
designed for the interactive, networked hypermedia environment
- URL
- Uniform Resource Locator, a uniform reference system for locating
individual files on virtually any computer system on the Internet
The first release of NCSA Mosaic, in April 1993, was a client for X
Window System platforms. Clients for the Macintosh and Microsoft Windows
platforms followed in the fall of 1993. As of April 1994, the following
versions had been released:
- NCSA Mosaic for Microsoft Windows
- Version 2.0alpha4
- NCSA Mosaic for the Macintosh
- Version 1.0.3
- NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System
- Version 2.4
National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-win@ncsa.uiuc.edu