NCSA X Mosaic 0.5 released

Marc Andreessen (marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu)
Sat, 23 Jan 93 07:21:17 -0800

By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version
0.5 of NCSA's Motif-based networked information systems and World Wide
Web browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released:

file://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/xmosaic/xmosaic-0.5.tar.Z

This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:

SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).

Binaries for these platforms are available on ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.5. More binaries will be supplied as I am
able to find other Motif-configured platforms to use (DEC MIPS
probably within the next half hour).

Although this is alpha/beta software, I'm looking more for feedback on
design and functionality than bug reports right now -- down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don't take
the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too. New
releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.

A list of current and future capabilities of X Mosaic follows this
message.

Cheers,
Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu




Current capabilities
....................


Motif interface.
Multiple toplevel windows.
Save/mail/print document (plaintext or HTML).
Document source- and URL-viewing windows.
History list per window with GUI interface.
Option for new window per document (TurboGopher interface).
On-the-fly font selection.
Many common document choices accessible via menubar.
Keyword search capability.
Hotlist capability -- keep list of interesting documents,
  add/remove items, list is persistent across sessions.
Smart handling of documents too big for single X window --
  virtual document pages via inlined hypertext.
Interruptable at any time via SIGUSR1 signal.
No config or resource file installation required; 
  self-contained executable.
Hypertext help.
Integration with NCSA Collage and NCSA DTM to broadcast documents 
  into real-time networked workgroup collaboration sessions.
Stable! :-)




Future capabilities
...................


Multimedia/MIME.
Asynchronous collaboration functionality.
  (annotations, references, revision control).
Hypermedia interface to scientific data.
Visual hyperweb/hierarchy layout and navigation.
3D/immersive interface.
???