The development of Mosaic, a user-friendly graphical Internet/WWW browser, is a particularly notable but unpredicted HPCC Program success. Mosaic allows a user to move through Internet/WWW information in an intuitive manner (either by simply "pointing and clicking" on the hypertext link, denoted by colored text, or on an icon or an image, or by explicitly naming the URL), and the connection is transparently made using http (hypertext transport protocol). The NCSA Mosaic home page has links to "What's New" files containing date-stamped announcements of new servers or new information on existing servers:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html
The announcement in November 1993 of the availability of Mosaic on the Macintosh, PCs, and Unix workstations has been followed by unprecedented activity by organizations setting up servers and users accessing them. Today nearly 10,000 organizations have Internet/WWW/Mosaic servers -- these include organizations within the Federal government and other governments, corporations, and schools (from universities to elementary schools). The NCSA Mosaic client software, which is freely available worldwide, is being distributed over the Internet at the rate of about 100,000 copies per month. WWW traffic on the Internet is growing faster than any other kind of traffic. In FY 1994 NCSA entered into agreements enabling commercialization of Mosaic, and several products have been marketed. NCSA maintains a public-domain reference implementation that has stimulated both research in the field and innovation in the commercial market.
The White House home page is:
Some U.S. Congress and Library of Congress URLs are:
The isse of "Science", August 12, 1994, has special coverage on Computing in Science. An article on pages 895 to 901 by B.R. Schatz and J.B. Hardin contains an account of the development of WWW and NCSA Mosaic. Science, volume 265, August 12, 1994.