The Internet Motorways


Find out where the bandwidth is and who owns it

http://www.telegeography.com/

Mosaic 10 years old

Ten years ago this month, software developers at the University of Illinois released Mosaic, which used graphical images and simplicity to open the World Wide Web to the masses.

What had been a domain of scientists and computer geeks dominated by cumbersome language and technical complexity became simple enough for nearly anyone to use.

Mosaic was released in April 1993 by the school's National Center for Supercomputing Applications as free software. It became the foundation for today's Web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Communications' Communicator. Mosaic's lead developer, Marc Andreessen, became one of Netscape's founders and took some of his UI colleagues with him.

"It was an accelerator for the whole Internet," said Larry Smarr, the former director of the computing center. "It sort of took the Internet to the next level of capability."

Before Mosaic, access to the Internet and the World Wide Web was limited to text. The new software brought a way to integrate images and sound with words.

Andreessen and his colleague Eric Bina had a clear goal when they started ? a browser that was easy to install, simple to use and would work with different computer operating systems.

"We knew it didn't have to be hard to run this thing," Bina said.

The first version of Mosaic worked only with UNIX systems. Windows and Macintosh versions followed later in 1993.

Once word about Mosaic's simplicity circulated, users couldn't get the software fast enough, turning it from a creation of computer geeks to the beginning of an information revolution.

The NCSA Web site recorded more than 1 million downloads within a year of Mosaic's release. New users eager to surf the Web downloaded 70,000 copies of the software monthly.

The Web Awards


Lists the nominees for the Webby Awards, a list in any case of very useful websites

http://www.webbyawards.com

Land Lubbers

A sure cure for seasickness is to sit under a tree
Spike Milligan

A ship is like a prison with the possibility of drowning
Dr Johnson

Are you an Ebay Virgin?

Although on the Internet since 1994, I'd never bought anything in an auction. Anyway recently I bought a hedge-trimmer from Argos, and afterwards checked if I could have bought it cheaper on Ebay. I found I could have bought a luxury model for the same price as I'd paid for my "bottom of the range" model. I'm now hooked and have 24 minutes to go before a bid I've made for a computer game for my son expires. www.ebay.co.uk

Wonderful Opera

The Opera Browser has many cute features, like remembering what pages you had open last time you used it.
I've just learnt a new trick, if you highlight a word on a Web Page and right-click you can select an option to get the dictionary or encyclopedia explanation. Now that's cool!

www.opera.com now in version 7.10

OCR has come on


My first experiences with OCR s/w a few years ago were miserable. But I've recently downloaded
an apparently free OCR package from http://www.abbyy.com/ which scanned an old magazine page for me and recovered it in Word with all the text, all the columns and layout plus all the images. There seemed to be a manageable number of OCR typos as well. The "free" version lacks error correction of the paid version, but frankly I didn't mind.

End of the PC Dinosaurs

By these I mean:-

• The inadequately sized floppy.
  
• The back-breakingly heavy monitor which is being replaced by the lightweight flat screen.
  
• Internal PC cards being largely replaced by USB
  
• The slow noisy analogue Modem, being replaced by Broadband
  

Best Uk News Site


www.newsnow.co.uk

300 Million Ancestors

Look up your Ancestors at the Mormon's Family Search Internet Genealogy Service Website

www.familysearch.org

Anonymous Web Access

Many ISPs including mine, NTL, cache web pages, to speed up everyone's access. Occasionally however the caching prevents you from seeing an updated version of the website. There are various tricks to get round this, for instance typing a random string after the URL eg www.red.net?hvfffdfderr. But you can also access the page to be a 100% sure via an anonymiser website.

http://www.anonymizer.com/


What effectively happens is that you access Websites via the URL

http://anon.free.anonymizer.com/http://www.cnn.com/

Oh what a Lovely War

Depuis six mille ans la guerre
Plaît aux peuples querelleurs,
Et Dieu perd son temps à faire
Les étoiles et les fleurs.

- Victor Hugo -

April Fools Day

History of Hoaxing

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/