The Mosaic Handbook for the X Window System

By Richard Koman, Dale Dougherty, Paula Ferguson

The Mosaic Handbook for the X Window System describes how to navigate the World Wide Web using Mosaic, the graphical interface designed at NCSA.Mosaic is designed to navigate the hyperlinks that connect the systems on the World Wide Web. Using Mosaic's point-and-click interface, a user can move from document to document, viewing text, graphics, video, audio, or the combination of any of these media, without having to worry about where that information is located. The Mosaic user gains access to the information on thousands of Internet servers found all over the world with no greater knowledge than is contained within the pages of this short book.Until recently, the Internet was largely a command-line phenomenon. A user needed to know a different tool for each operation (s)he wanted to perform, and each tool had its own obscure command-line interface. For the most part, where the tools displayed information at all, that information was text-based.Mosaic has changed all that. In addition to its interface to the World Wide Web, Mosaic provides a graphical interface to most Internet utilities, like FTP, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and WAIS. Users no longer need to know UNIX command-line syntax to perform common tasks on the Internet. This book describes how to use Mosaic to accomplish these tasks.A chapter in the book introduces the reader to HTML, the hypertext authoring language used by WWW documents. The reader will learn enough about HTML to create his/her own home page, thus becoming a potential information provider on the WWW! This book also explains how to customize and extend Mosaic to allow, for example, the use of other viewers and browsers.The book includes a CD containing Spyglass Mosaic V2.4 for the X Window System and a subscription to the Global Network Navigator (GNN ), the leading WWW-based information service on the Internet. (When a version is available, we will supply Enhanced NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System, V1.0.)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565920953
• ISBN13: 9781565920958
• Release Date: October 1994
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Good history and retrospective of the Web circa 1994

Oddly enough, O'Reilly and Associates, which publishes a new edition of "iWhatever - The Missing Manual" on every iWhatever product about every eight months is still printing and shipping this 12 year old computer book. It is an important one in terms of the history of the web, so I thought I would write a review on it. Just to be clear, my four stars refers to the value of the history in the book, not what current technical expertise you can hope to gain. This book is fun to look at in that you get O'Reilly's perspective on the Internet and where it was headed, detailed instructions on how to use the early popular browser Mosaic, and a look at the Global Network Navigator - a creation of O'Reilly's and one of the first attempts at building a kind of web Wiki. Particularly humorous is the book's attempt to explain what web surfing is - the term and the concept were both new in 1994. In this age before Java and applets, HTML with imbedded images was the closest thing you were going to get to multimedia, and the book talks extensively about HTML and building your own documents with imbedded images. In conjunction with creating HTML documents is a discussion of HoTMetaL, an early HTML authoring product. The book ends with a look forward at the web's possible future, and it is interesting to look at these early interviews when the idea of web as a haven for people of ill intent hadn't entered the picture or anyone's mind yet. In 1994, everybody's intentions were still assumed to be good and the web was going to be one great big source of information, accessible to all. I would recommend picking up a copy of this computing history classic and looking through it if you can find it. It is quite the history lesson.