Dude, have ya heard of this “World Wide Web” thing?

Written by Mr. Bessler on March 15, 1994

I was talking to this KMFDM-freak in the Quad last night and he wouldn’t shut-up about this program called Mosaic that uses his Baud modem to “browse” something he called the “World Wide Web”. Not sure how useful it’s going be, but he seemed super-excited about it. He said it’s much better than America Online. I was able to find it with TurboGopher, but after installing Mosaic, I don’t quite understand the whole concept. Read Me file. Bingo. I’m sure this will clear-up my confusion:

What is NCSA Mosaic
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NCSA Mosaic is a distributed hypermedia browser designed for
information discovery and retrieval.  It provides a unified interface
to the diverse protocols, data formats and information archives
used on the Internet.

Swing and a miss.

Update (March 16, 1994 at 3:23AM): Okay, this is really cool. This guy explains it better than those tech guys do:

...electronic links known as hyperlinks are embedded in richly
formatted documents that can include full-color images and sounds.
NCSA Mosaic presents these documents like the pages of an interactive,
scrollable, online book. You can move around within complex documents,
as well as from document to document across the network, simply by 
clicking on these hyperlinks. You use the same interface for navigation
and for document viewing; you can even retrieve information from
Gopher, WAIS, and anonymous FTP servers without moving to a different
application for each one.

Anywhere there is a bit of underlined blue text, you can click it and it will take you to a different place, but what’s crazy is that the page can live anywhere in the world. The blue text turns purple after you’ve visited it, so you know where you’ve been. Images take a while to load-up on the screen. But still, pretty sweet stuff.

Update (March 16, 1994 at 4:02AM): No idea what “HTTP://” means. It’s everywhere, just like Meg Ryan.