Nuts and Bolts of Mosaic

Alan Levine, MCLI

Mosaic and the Three W's

When you use Mosaic, you are navigating a subset of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (WWW). The "Web" was pioneered by European scientists as a means of linking on-line data. Mosaic uses a universal set of protocols for sending and receiving information. Anything sent over the Internet travels as either a string of text characters ("ASCII" text) or a series of "0" and "1" (binary). When you use a "client" program such as Mosaic, it converts transmitted files into formats that your particular computer understands. For example, graphics are typically sent as "GIF" (Graphics Interchange Format). The Mosaic program for the Macintosh can translate that file to PICT format and display it on the screen. Likewise, the Mosaic client for Windows can interpret the same file as a Windows Bitmap file and properly display it. Such universal file formats also exist for sound and video files.

The "language" of Mosaic is called HTML, or HyperText Markup Language. A page on the Mosaic screen may display headings of different levels, bold and italic type styles, enumerated lists, embedded graphics, and hypertext links. The Mosaic page arrives to your computer as plain text characters with special "tags" that mark these different items. A Mosaic client program reads the "tags" and then knows how to display it for you. The same HTML files can be sent to a Mac, an IBM, or a Sun, and each client Mosaic program can display the information or handle a link to another server. Mosaic completes links using a URL, or Universal Resource Locator, an addressing scheme where one document on the Internet can point to any other document on any other computer on the Internet.

The MCLI Server

On January 14, 1994, MCLI announced its World Wide Web Server on the "NCSA What's New Page." Within two days, our server received more than 400 connections from all over the United States, as well as Canada, England, Germany, Australia, and Chile. The MCLI home page offers:

To access the MCLI Server, select Open URL... from the File menu and enter:

          http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/

Getting Mosaic

The Macintosh and Windows Mosaic clients are available from the MCLI AppleTalk file server and the MCLI Gopher Server in the directories:

/Into the Internet/1-Internet with the Mac/World Wide Web/NCSA Mosaic/
/Into the Internet/1-Internet with IBM/World Wide Web/NCSA Mosaic/

For more details, see the "Mosaic Read me" file in these directories.

To use Mosaic, your computer must have physical access to the Internet (a "TCP/IP" connection) If you have any questions about access, contact your college's computer network administrators.

MacMosaic requires a color Macintosh computer with a hard disk, System 7.x, the MacTCP Control Panel v2.x, and at least 2.5 MB of available RAM.

WinMosaic requires an IBM compatible computer, 80386 processor, 4 MB of RAM, Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced Mode, and a TCP/IP system library or stack ("winsock").

Maricopa Center for Learning & Instruction (MCLI)
The Internet Connection at MCLI is Alan Levine --}
Comments to alan.levine@domail.maricopa.edu