Starting Points for Internet Exploration

If you are new to NCSA Mosaic, the Mosaic demo document will allow you to explore Mosaic's hypermedia capabilities; this document focuses on Internet resources in general, including several different types of information systems that do not have intrinsic hypermedia capabilities.

Disclaimer: NCSA has no control over any of the resources referenced by this document. Some or all of these resources may be unavailable at any time. This is a random sampling of Internet resources and makes no claim to be general or comprehensive.

• Web Overview: An overview of the World Wide Web, a distributed hypermedia system developed at CERN in Switzerland. NCSA Mosaic is a World Wide Web client with additional features.
• Web Project: An overview of the World Wide Web project, headed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.
• Other Web Documents
  • Data Sources By Service: A listing of data sources within the World Wide Web, organized by information service (Gopher, WAIS, etc.).
  • Information By Subject: A listing of data sources within the World Wide Web, organized by topic and subtopic.
  • Web News: The latest World Wide Web news bulletin.
  • Web Servers Directory: The central listing of known World Wide Web servers. Servers not yet registered with this list may be noted in the Mosaic What's New list.
• InterNIC Info Source: A Gopher server run by the InterNIC; this is a good place to find general Internet-related information.
• NCSA Mosaic Home Page: The document NCSA Mosaic accesses upon startup by default; this document tells you what the latest released version of NCSA Mosaic is at any given time.
• NCSA Mosaic Demo Page: A self-guided tour of the hypermedia capabilities of NCSA Mosaic.
• NCSA Mosaic "What's New" Page: A day-by-day listing of new information resources on the Internet available through NCSA Mosaic.
• NCSA Doc Finder Quick search-and-jump to any HTML documents on NCSA's web server.
• NCSA Home Page: The home page for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• Other Home Pages: These are some interesting home pages located all around the world. For the complete listing of home pages, see the Web Servers Directory; for new home pages, see the Mosaic What's New page.
  • ANU Bioinformatics
  • British Columbia
  • BSDI Home Page
  • Carnegie Mellon
  • CERN Home Page
  • Cornell Law School
  • Cornell Theory Center
  • DESY Home Page
  • Honolulu Home Page
  • Indiana Home Page
  • National Center for Atmospheric Research
  • Northwestern Home Page
  • Ohio State Home Page
  • SSC Home Page
• WAIS Starting Point: WAIS (Wide Area Information System) is a powerful searching engine in use over the Internet. This document tells you how to access WAIS servers through NCSA Mosaic.
• Gopher: Gopher is a popular menu-based information system in use on the Internet.
  • Gopherspace Overview: A comprehensive listing of all the known Gopher servers in the world, organized by continent.
  • Veronica: Veronica is a way to search "Gopherspace" for specific pieces of information.
  • NCSA Gopher: The Gopher server for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
  • CTC Gopher: The Gopher server for the Cornell Theory Center.
  • PSC Gopher: The Gopher server for the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center.
  • SDSC Gopher: The Gopher server for the San Diego Supercomputer Center.
  • Original (UMN) Gopher: The Gopher server at the University of Minnesota, home of Gopher.
  • UIUC Gopher: The central Gopher server at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
  • UIUC Weather Machine: The Weather Machine contains up-to-the-minute forecasts and weather satellite images.
  • USC Math Gopher: The Gopher server for the University of South Carolina Department of Mathematics.
• FTP Sites: This is a comprehensive listing of anonymous FTP sites. This listing is not being actively maintained; it is provided as a proof-of-concept. We encourage others to maintain such a listing and make it available to the network.
• Usenet Newsgroups: This is a comprehensive listing of Usenet newsgroups available at CERN, where the listing is housed. This listing is not entirely appropriate for sites other than CERN; it is referenced here to encourage individual sites to set up such listings themselves.
• Finger Gateway: This is a gateway to finger, a common utility program used to obtain information about people on the Internet.
• HyTelnet Gateway: This is a gateway to HyTelnet, a comprehensive index of publicly-accessible electronic library catalogs.
• TeXinfo Gateway: This is a gateway to a large collection of TeXinfo documents at Ohio State University.
• Other Information Resources
  • Hyper-G Gateway: Hyper-G is another Internet-based hypermedia system; this gateway is located in Austria.
  • TechInfo Gateway: Techinfo is another Internet-based information system (somewhat like Gopher).
  • X.500 Gateway: X.500 is a Internet-based phone book service.
  • Whois Gateway: Whois is another Internet-based phone book service.
• Other Documents: Here are some additional interesting information resources not listed above that may be interesting to people exploring the Internet.
  • ANU Art History Exhibit: An exhibit of art history materials collected and put online by Michael Greenhalgh at Australian National University.
  • Bryn Mawr Classical Review: BMCR is a review of classical literature distributed over the Internet.
  • Electronic Visualization Lab: An exhibit of work done at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
  • Internet Services List: A standard list of Internet services collected by Scott Yanoff.
  • Internet Talk Radio: A collection of radio programs from Internet Talk Radio -- because asynchronous times demand asynchronous radio.
  • Library of Congress Vatican Exhibit: An exhibit of materials from the Vatican Library.
  • Los Alamos Physics Papers (Gopher): The Gopher-based interface to a central repository of physics papers at Los Alamos.
  • Los Alamos Physics Papers (Web): The Web-based interface to a central repository of physics papers at Los Alamos.
  • NCSA Access Magazine: A hypermedia version of NCSA Access, a general-interest magazine published by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
  • Postmodern Culture: Postmodern Culture is an edited journal distributed over the Internet.
  • Unified CS Tech Reports: A central index of computer science technical reports from all around the world.
  • White House Papers: A WAIS server containing all of the papers from the Clinton Administration from Day 1 to about two days ago.
  • Internet RFCs: An archive of Internet Request for Comments documents, the technical documentation of the Internet.
  • Zippy The Pinhead: Asynchronous irreverence.