{
  "id": "1994-june-insights-into-mosaic",
  "slug": "1994-june-insights-into-mosaic",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1994-june-insights-into-mosaic.html",
  "year": 1994,
  "month": "June",
  "monthNum": 6,
  "headline": "Insights into Mosaic",
  "kicker": "",
  "author_name": "Wallace Winfrey",
  "author_title": "Staff",
  "affiliation": "NICAR",
  "summary": "The World Wide Web, developed at CERN, organizes the Internet through hypertext and hypermedia links, with the Mosaic browser making it accessible through a user-friendly graphical interface that can display text, graphics, sounds, and videos.",
  "keywords": [
    "Internet",
    "hypertext",
    "browser"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Technology",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Data & Databases"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "World Wide Web",
    "FTP",
    "Telnet",
    "HTML",
    "Hypercard",
    "Mosaic",
    "Visual Basic",
    "FoxPro"
  ],
  "full_text": "The Internet - it's big, it's cool, it's really confusing for most people. With terms like ftp, telnet, and finger, it's not exactly intuitive either. One could spend years just trying to figure out the syntax to send e-mail and transfer files. But if things continue to move in the direction of something called the World Wide Web (w3), this could cease to be a problem.\n\nWhat is the World Wide Web? Simply put, it's an effort to logically organize the Internet. Developed at CERN laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland, it was originally designed to enable scientists there to share their research on high-energy physics. It quickly became obvious that w3 would be a good thing to implement on the Internet as well.\n\nThe Web creates a system of \"logical\" interconnected links between various types of information using hypertext. Even if you haven't heard the term \"hypertext,\" you've probably already used it. Windows help files are a form of hypertext, as is Hypercard on the Macintosh.\n\nHere's how it works: say you are reading an article about the Cuban revolution and you come across the words Che Guevera. In a hypertext environment, clicking on the underlined words would take you to a document about Che, perhaps a biography or a commentary of sorts. However, text can get really confusing as you jump from one document to the next. Besides, who wants to limit their information to text only? With hypermedia you can click on underlined text and go not only to another text document, but to a graphics file (a photograph of Che Guevera), a sound (a speech by Guevera), or even a digitized movie.\n\nThe Web is organized around the concept of \"pages.\" These pages are technically called HTML (\"HyperText Markup Language\") documents. HTML is a low-level programming language that defines how that page will look and where the links (the underlined words) go to when that page is viewed.\n\nUntil last year, there really was no good application to browse the Web. Almost all \"browser\" applications were text-based, and while it was possible to link other forms of media, you had to download it first, and then open it up with the appropriate program. Then came Mosaic.\n\nMosaic represented a breakthrough in w3 browsers. With Mosaic, you are no longer confined to looking at a command-line using arrow keys to navigate. You can now point-and-click your way around using a mouse. Mosaic also has the ability to display graphics within a document, and even define text size and appearance.\n\nAll this gives w3 pages a hitherto-unrealized capacity to present information in a way that is not only logical, but even visually appealing. This might account for the jump in w3 use of over 300,000 percent in the last year alone.\n\nMosaic also lets you listen to the linked sound files and view the linked movies while you are browsing a document. While it relies on other applications to accomplish this, the operation is smooth enough that it's more or less invisible.\n\nOther applications can also be linked to Mosaic, letting you use telnet or tn3270 or e-mail seamlessly. Mosaic also lets you input data into a page. This is extremely useful if you want to send or receive feedback on the appearance of a page.\n\nHowever, feedback is only one small application of data entry onto pages. HTML documents (Mosaic pages) can also be used as a front end for database files. Just as many use Visual Basic to customize a front-end for their FoxPro files, HTML can be used as well.\n\nThis brings up some very interesting possibilities, especially in the realm of computer-assisted reporting. By putting a database up and customizing a front-end for it using HTML, it now becomes possible to deliver that data to anyone in the world, in the form they want it.\n\nSay you are working on a story about bridges (to lift from a recent CARR-L thread) and you want to know how many bridges in the United States last year didn't pass initial inspections. You also want to know, out of those that didn't, how many were closed down. You would then go to the appropriate w3 page, enter in the variables (bridges, inspection failure and closings), define the form of your output (as a .dbf or .txt file) and then press enter.\n\nThe computer at the other end does its crunching and then generates a customized document on-the-fly containing the relevant information. No more waiting weeks for a 9-track tape. No more trying to convert the data into a readable form. Just data, as you want it, when you need it.\n\nMosaic does require a certain kind of connection to the Internet to work properly. To use it, you have to have what is known as a TCP/IP connection. Local area networks connected to the Internet sometimes have this kind of connection.\n\nIf you are confined to a modem, you need a dial-up TCP/IP connection to a SLIP server. What these are demands a whole other article to explain. But if you have the right connection, you can access the Web fairly easily.\n\nTo download the latest version of Mosaic, ftp to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu and look in the directory called Mosaic. I should mention however that there are other browsers besides Mosaic. For example, just this morning, I downloaded a browser for the Macintosh called MacWeb. In its defense, though, Mosaic is the only browser to have been implemented on the Mac, Windows, the Amiga and XWindows.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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      "slug": "1994-november-hooking-into-the-internet",
      "score": 0.227
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1994-june-insights-into-mosaic.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1994-june-insights-into-mosaic.json"
}