VMS Mosaic is a GUI

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

 web

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...

 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...

 for use on the OpenVMS

OpenVMS

OpenVMS , previously known as VAX-11/VMS, VAX/VMS or VMS, is a computer server operating system that runs on VAX, Alpha and Itanium-based families of computers. Contrary to what its name suggests, OpenVMS is not open source software; however, the source listings are available for purchase...

 operating system.

Description

VMS Mosaic is one of the two remaining direct descendants (see also Mosaic-CK

Mosaic-CK

Mosaic-CK is a GUI web browser for use on Mac OS X, Tenon Power MachTen, Linux and other compatible Unix-like OSes.-Description:Mosaic-CK and VMS Mosaic are the only direct descendants of NCSA Mosaic which are still being actively developed.Mosaic-CK is developed by Cameron Kaiser who has stated...

) of NCSA Mosaic (the first popular graphical web browser) which are still being actively developed . VMS Mosaic is supported on VAX

VAX

VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...

, Alpha

DEC Alpha

Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation , designed to replace the 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer ISA and its implementations. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors...

, and Itanium

Itanium

Itanium is a family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture . Intel markets the processors for enterprise servers and high-performance computing systems...

 systems. It is a non-commercial (freeware) browser whose use is covered by various licenses including the original 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...

 license.

The current release (version 4.2) supports HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 V4.0, secure connections via OpenSSL

OpenSSL

OpenSSL is an open source implementation of the SSL and TLS protocols. The core library implements the basic cryptographic functions and provides various utility functions...

, cookies

HTTP cookie

A cookie, also known as an HTTP cookie, web cookie, or browser cookie, is used for an origin website to send state information to a user's browser and for the browser to return the state information to the origin site...

, and various image formats including GIF, JPEG

JPEG

In computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....

, PNG, BMP, TGA

Truevision TGA

Truevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. . It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible PCs to support Highcolor/truecolor display...

, TIFF

Tagged Image File Format

TIFF is a file format for storing images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and both amateur and professional photographers in general. As of 2009, it is under the control of Adobe Systems...

, and JPEG 2000

JPEG 2000

JPEG 2000 is an image compression standard and coding system. It was created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee in 2000 with the intention of superseding their original discrete cosine transform-based JPEG standard with a newly designed, wavelet-based method...

. It does not support Java, JavaScript or style sheets.

History

Bjorn S. Nilsson ported NCSA Mosaic 1.2 to VMS in the summer of 1993. When NCSA stopped development of NCSA Mosaic at version 2.7b5 in January 1997, several small groups of software developers continued work on Mosaic. Two of the resulting browsers were VMS Mosaic and mMosaic. Although work on mMosaic stopped in 2004, much of its HTML engine has been incorporated into VMS Mosaic.

External links

• VMS Mosaic home page