AMosaic - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

AMosaic is an Amiga

Amiga

The Amiga is a family of personal computers that was sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The first model was launched in 1985 as a high-end home computer and became popular for its graphical, audio and multi-tasking abilities...

port

Porting

In computer science, porting is the process of adapting software so that an executable program can be created for a computing environment that is different from the one for which it was originally designed...

of the Mosaic

Mosaic (web browser)

Mosaic is the web browser credited with popularizing the World Wide Web. It was also a client for earlier protocols such as FTP, NNTP, and gopher. Its clean, easily understood user interface, reliability, Windows port and simple installation all contributed to making it the application that opened...

web browser

Web browser

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content...

, developed beginning in 1993, and was the first graphical web browser for the Amiga. AMosaic was based on NCSA's Mosaic, but was not distributed by the University of Illinois or NCSA

National Center for Supercomputing Applications

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering. NCSA operates as a unit of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but it provides high-performance...

. It was developed by Michael Fischer at Stony Brook University, Michael Meyer at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, and Michael Witbrock

Michael Witbrock

Michael Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. A native of New Zealand, he currently lives in Austin, Texas, and is the current Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a genuine Artificial Intelligence.-...

at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

. The first version was released to the public on December 25, 1993, and the last version available was a 2.0 prerelease.

As is the case for other versions of Mosaic worldwide, AMosaic is no longer updated or supported. It has, however, been ported to the AmigaOS source compatible AROS

AROS Research Operating System

AROS Research Operating System is a free and open source multi media centric implementation of the AmigaOS 3.1 APIs. Designed to be portable and flexible, ports are currently available for x86-based and PowerPC-based PCs in native and hosted flavors, with other architectures in development...

operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. The developers of AMosaic went on to develop IBrowse

IBrowse

IBrowse is an MUI-based web browser for the Amiga range of computers, and was a rewritten follow-on to Amiga Mosaic, one of the first web browsers for the Amiga Computer. IBrowse was originally developed for a company called Omnipresence, now defunct...

, which is still in active development today.

Version 1.4 is required to use forms.

Amiga-Only Features

At the time of its launch, AMosaic offered several features beyond the capabilities of Mosaic, thanks to the unique capabilities of the AmigaOS

AmigaOS

AmigaOS is the default native operating system of the Amiga personal computer. It was developed first by Commodore International, and initially introduced in 1985 with the Amiga 1000...

and existing support libraries.

The Magic User Interface

Magic User Interface

The Magic User Interface is an object-oriented system by Stefan Stuntz to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the outfit according to personal taste....

(MUI) system used to construct the user interface

User interface

The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...

enabled user full user-customization of fonts, colors, and background patterns.

AMosaic makes use of AmigaOS Datatypes for its external and inline image decoding, making it simple for users to extend the list of supported image types by installing the appropriate operating system plugin.

An ARexx

ARexx

ARexx is an implementation of the REXX language for the Amiga, written in 1987 by William S. Hawes, with a number of Amiga-specific features beyond standard REXX facilities. Like most REXX implementations, ARexx is an interpreted language...

inter-application communication interface was built into AMosaic, allowing simple scripting and transferring of data between AMosaic and other software. Using ARexx, users can write external scripts to ask AMosaic to retrieve a page and return it in ASCII

ASCII

The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

format, or AMosaic can execute a script calling an external bookmark tracking program.

Uses the networking software DNET, AmiTCP 3.0b2, or AS225r2.

Publicity

AMosaic was featured as the cover story in the March, 1995 issue of Amiga World

Amiga World

Amiga World was a magazine dedicated to the Amiga computer platform. It was a prominent Amiga magazine, particularly in the United States, and was published by IDG Publishing from 1985 until April 1995. The first several issues were distributed before the computer was available for sale to the public...

magazine.

The original developers, Michael Fischer, Michael Meyer, and Michael Witbrock

Michael Witbrock

, co-wrote User Extensibility in Amiga Mosaic, which was presented by Michael Witbrock

Michael Witbrock

at the Second International World Wide Web Conference in Chicago, Illinois, October 17–20, 1994.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.