The IEEE World-Wide Web comes to life

We start the new year with a bang. IEEE now has a World-Wide Web server in operation and The Institute is the first product to use our new capability. If you are reading this newspaper in its printed and mailed format, you are reading it after many Internet browsers have viewed it electronically. There is now a better way for those members who prefer the electronic medium. This is especially significant for our members who live a long way from the central United States, where The Institute is printed and mailed, and for whom The Institute arrives too late to be timely. I would like to note my appreciation to our Publications Department staff who have pushed to bring The Institute on line in this manner--in particular, Phyllis Hall, Tom Bontrager and Ken Moore.

HOW TO ACCESS.   There are two levels of access to the Web. Both require full Internet access--which means more than an e-mail connection. If you are using a personal computer and have one with a 486/33MHz processor with 8 Mb RAM, or a Mac of equivalent capability, with a local area network (LAN) or serial line Internet protocol (SLIP) connection, then you can use the Mosaic graphics-oriented browser. You can get a copy of Mosaic using file transfer protocol (FTP) from "ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu:/PC/ Mosaic" (the part before the colon is the site address and the part after is the directory). Then you install it on your PC and run it under Windows. Please see my August 1994 column in The Institute for more information about Mosaic and the Web. There are also versions for Mac and workstation users. Mosaic allows you, if you have all the bells and whistles, to connect to any Web server, read hypertext, view graphics, listen to sound clips and move around the Web by using a mouse to click on highlighted key words.

If you have a simpler personal computer that does not run Windows, or if you cannot connect to the Internet using a LAN or by dialing up using SLIP, then you may be able to use Lynx to access the Web.

USING LYNX.   Lynx is a text-only browser developed at the University of Kansas. Lynx runs on the host computer where you have your log-in ID, not on your PC. My thanks to Bob Greiner, who suggested Lynx as a faster way to access the Web, and to Joe Clark, who wrote a nice article in the Toronto Star about Lynx. Ron Vetter, Chris Spell and Charles Ward wrote a super article on Mosaic and the World-Wide Web in the October issue of the IEEE Computer Society's magazine, Computer. In that article, they list FTP sites for a variety of software. I took their advice and got a copy of Lynx from "ftp2.cc.ukans.edu:/pub/WWW/lynx". Don't forget that upper and lower case characters are different in Unix, so type carefully. My system administrator installed the Lynx software in about five minutes. I logged in and typed "lynx" at the system prompt. It worked like a charm. Let's see what Lynx does and why it may be for you. You may want to see if Lynx is available on your host computer, and if not, ask your system administrator to get and install it.

With Lynx you cannot view graphics or listen to sound clips, but you can read hypertext, place the cursor on highlighted words using the arrow keys and move around the Web by pressing the enter key. Lynx is much faster than Mosaic because it does not transfer the large files needed to display graphics or produce sound on your computer. Some people who have both Mosaic and Lynx choose to use Lynx because of its speed. In many cases, the text content is much more significant than the graphics and sound.

THE IEEE WEB.   All Web servers have what are called home pages. The Web home page corresponds to the root directory in gopher. To connect to the IEEE Gopher, we type "gopher gopher.ieee.org" from the system command prompt after logging in. To access the IEEE Web server with Lynx, we type "lynx http://www.ieee.org/" from the system command prompt after logging in. Using Mosaic, we start up Mosaic in Windows, click on "File", "Open URL", and enter "http://www.ieee.org/" into the window. The http stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the equivalent of the Web server address.

What do we see next--the IEEE Web home page. We view this page and using either mouse or arrow keys (depending on whether we are using Mosaic or Lynx) we can move around the screen or scroll to see more. The text is displayed in an attractive manner because it is written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Some words are highlighted and if we click (or hit enter if we are using Lynx), we see the screen contents change as we are taken through the Web to view a different file. There may be a time delay as the next file may be on a computer in another country (anywhere on the Internet) and that file has to be downloaded to your PC where you are running Mosaic (or to your host running Lynx). There may be some graphics, an IEEE logo, a photograph, a pie chart, for example. These we will not see if we are using Lynx.

The highlighted words may take us to view other files--such as the various articles in THE INSTITUTE--or they may take us to other home pages, such as home pages for IEEE societies that have created their own Web servers. Each of these will have their own URL so that you can go directly to the home page of your choice or see the variety of home pages that will develop over time. The Institute has its own URL "http://www.ieee.org/ti.html". Browsers have the capability to store lots of different URLs so that you can select as needed. Some of these URLs can be very long and difficult to type in correctly.

For those of you Internet browsers who are reading this column electronically, did I get it right? Remember, I wrote this long before I saw it electronically. For those of you who are reading the printed word, would browsing electronically be useful for you? Now that we have a complete electronic publication option for The Institute, where do we go from here?

PRINTED FORMAT.   Does IEEE continue to mail printed versions of The Institute to the membership? For some time--yes. In the future--this is a question for you and the IEEE Board of Directors. Should IEEE members have the option to receive the printed version if they have access to the Web document? Think about what you want. Let your favorite IEEE director know your views. Some of you can't wait to reduce the amount of paper you get from IEEE. But others are not so keen to drop the printed format, either because they do not have access to this technology or because they do not want to. We have started something here. This is the first IEEE publication for the general membership to be delivered electronically.