WWW and prospero

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Date: Fri, 8 Nov 91 10:00:33 GMT+0100
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-id: <9111080900.AA04556@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: www-talk
Subject: WWW and prospero

Begin forwarded message:

To: rusty@mail.cornell.edu
Cc: tbl@cernvax.cern.ch, bcn@june.cs.washington.edu
Subject: WWW and prospero
Date: Thu, 07 Nov 91 19:36:05 -0500
From: Edward Vielmetti <emv@ox.com>
X-Mts: smtp


   Does anyone know about WWW (World Wide Web) and Prospero, and how I can find
   out more information about them? Thanks!

Prospero is a remote file system.  If you have an archie client (like
the archie clients at ftp.cs.widener.edu:/pub/archie/) you'll be
using the Prospero protocol to send queries to the servers.  You can
pick up the server at june.cs.washington.edu:/pub/prospero.tar.Z, and
look at the documentation in june.cs.washington.edu:/pub/pfs/doc/.

WWW is an interesting hypertext system from CERN.  You can try it out
by telnetting to info.cern.ch (login: www) or by ftp'ing the clients
or servers from that site.  What's particularly neat is that you can
embed references in a WWW document which point to WAIS servers (as
well as to other WWW documents or files on anonymous FTP) - that makes
it quite straightforward to build on-line systems with a mix of
structured menus and searching stuff.

I'd compare WWW with "gopher" from U of Minnesota (see
boombox.micro.umn.edu:/pub/gopher/); both of them would be suitable
for building a campus-wide information system with.  WWW is much more
of a web with links sending you off hither and yon; selections on
gopher menus can set you talking to servers a long distance away, but
it seems from what I've looked at to be much more of a hierarchical
approach.  WWW also lets users design their own menus.  You can test
out gopher by telnetting to consultant.micro.umn.edu, login gopher.

Both WWW and gopher offer snappy user interfaces for NeXT machines.

   Aaron (Rusty) Lloyd                  Cornell Information Technologies
   rusty@mail.cornell.edu                       SCAdian, and proud of it!

As an aside, it would be really nice if WWW could be taught the
Prospero protocol like it knows WAIS....

-- 

Edward Vielmetti, vice president for research, MSEN Inc. emv@msen.com
       MSEN, Inc. 628 Brooks Ann Arbor MI 48103 +1 313 741 1120