Scientific
Applications:
NCSA CELEBRATES MOSAIC BIRTHDAY
WITH EXCITING SYMPOSIUM
In 1993, there was no AOL, no Google or Amazon.com, no MP3s, airline
e-tickets
or eBay. Then came NCSA's Mosaic Web browser, the first widely popular
graphical interface for the brand new World Wide Web.
Within a year, NCSA's Web site logged more than 1 million downloads of its
free Mosaic software and some of the Mosaic developers left NCSA to form
Netscape Inc. By the end of the decade, the World Wide Web was part of our
lives and the anchor of a multibillion dollar business sector.
On April 29, the center that helped bring the Web into so many lives will
host
a symposium that will reflect on the impact of Mosaic and look ahead to the
technology breakthroughs that will change our lives in the next decade. The
event will be webcast at
realvideo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/asxfiles/MosaicAnniversary.asx.
"The Future Frontier: Computing on NCSA Mosaic's 10th Anniversary," will
feature five of the best known experts in their fields:
- Vinton Cerf is senior vice president of Architecture and Technology at
WorldCom and widely known as one of the "Fathers of the Internet" for
co-developing the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.
- Ray Ozzie is founder, chairman and CEO of Groove Networks. Previously, he
founded Iris Associates, where he created and led the development of Lotus
Notes, the defining groupware product used by more than 100 million people
worldwide.
- Dan Reed is director of NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing
Applications) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and a principal
investigator with the National Science Foundation's TeraGrid project, an
effort to build and deploy the world's largest, most comprehensive computing
infrastructure for open scientific research.
- Rick Rashid is vice president of research and head of the Microsoft
Research Group. Rashid was also a professor at Carnegie Mellon University,
where he co-developed one of the earliest networked computer games, and was
director of the CMU Mach Operating System Project.
- David Kuck is an Intel Fellow and director of Intel's KAI Software Lab, a
leading provider of performance-oriented compilers and programming tools used
in multithreaded applications. Previously, he was a faculty member in the
University of Illinois' computer science and electrical and computer
engineering departments.
"Mosaic was important because it made the technology of the Web transparent
and helped catalyze the build out of the Internet," said Reed. "As a result,
more people wanted to use the Web and put up documents. Ultimately, it
democratized access to information and gave everyone with a computer their own
printing press."
Where will computer technology take us from here? Access to active content,
such as information from remote sensors, through grids is one possibility. The
integration of embedded computing technology into our lives -- from monitors
that measure health data to software that tracks the whereabouts of your kids
-- is another. Many more future scenarios will be discussed at the Mosaic
symposium.
For more information, see
www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Conferences/MosaicEvent/.
NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) is a national
high-performance computing center that develops and deploys cutting-edge
computing, networking and information technologies. Located at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA is funded by the National Science
Foundation. Additional support comes from the state of Illinois, the
University of Illinois, private sector partners and other federal agencies.
For more information, see www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.
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