The Internet - the worldwide "network of networks" - is well on its way to becoming a house-hold name. Never before has there been a means for moving so much information so fast to so wide an audience.
Gopher
As the Internet has expanded it has become ever more sophisticated and different tools have been developed for accessing its vast store of information. One such device is gopher which, through a series of menus, lets you both browse the Internet by topic and then access individual resources quickly and easily.
Gopher was originally developed at the University of Minnesota in order to have a single point of entry to a system that would then read information residing on multiple machines. Gradually many sites have created their own "gopher holes" (there are now thousands all over the world) and "burrowing through the Internet" with gopher gives access to resources as diverse as an online library catalogue in Australia, local information at the user's home site, and important pedagogical information geared to an international audience (see the article on the new Internet gopher for teaching English as a second language on p. 4). Gopher has been developed for most popular platforms (Unix, PC, PC Windows, Macintosh, VM/CMS, and MVS).
World-Wide Web
An even more powerful architecture for organizing the Internet is the World Wide Web. The Web was established by CERN, a high-energy physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland and was originally envisioned as a collaborative project for sharing papers and data among physicists. It has, however, evolved far beyond that purpose and now includes such diverse information as Gaelic texts, art exhibits, movie clips, and electronic magazines.
The Web resembles gopher in many ways but is distinguished by being a hypermedia system. Whereas in gopher information can be accessed over the Internet only in linear fashion, as if turning the pages of a book in sequential order, hypermedia organizes data as an interconnected web of associations, permitting shortcuts from one point to another. By clicking on a single highlighted word in a text one can access various other related documents, each of which can include audio elements as well as full-color still and moving pictures.
Mosaic
Mosaic is a tool giving access to the World Wide Web. Mosaic is a global hypermedia network information browser which allows you to discover, retrieve and display interconnected documents and data from all around the world over the Internet via the Web.
Like the Web, Mosaic permits you to traverse the Internet by clicking your mouse on words, icons or images that point to other documents. Anyone signing on to Mosaic has access to a range of hypermedia interfaces as diverse as materials from the Vatican library, a database of complete recent White House press releases, and an amazing series of color images of the Shoemaker-Levy comet striking the planet Jupiter, the greatest collision ever recorded in our solar system. One can also receive online copies of "Global Network Navigator," the world's first Internet-based hypermedia magazine, and relax after a session of intensive Internet-surfing with online animated cartoons.
Mosaic -- versions of which are available for the Macintosh, Microsoft Windows on IBM PC-compatible machines and the X Window System on Unix computers -- is just one of many tools available for accessing the Internet. WAIS, telnet and FTP are others. Each has it own distinctive uses and features and together they are crucial keys to tapping into one of the greatest information resources going.
Soon, all CUNY colleges will have a connection to the Internet, allowing campus hosts that are appropriately networked access to all these tools. Gopher is available on CUNYVM.
-- by Holland Cotter