AMosaic was a

port A port is a maritime facility comprising one or more wharves or loading areas, where ships load and discharge cargo and passengers. Although usually situated on a sea coast or estuary, ports can also be found far inland, such as H ...

to the Amiga of the

Mosaic A mosaic is a pattern or image made of small regular or irregular pieces of colored stone, glass or ceramic, held in place by plaster/mortar, and covering a surface. Mosaics are often used as floor and wall decoration, and were particularly pop ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...

, developed beginning in 1993, and was the first graphical web browser for the Amiga. AMosaic was based on NCSA's Mosaic, but was not distributed by the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univer ...

or NCSA. It was developed by Michael Fischer at Stony Brook University, Michael Meyer at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, and

Michael Witbrock Michael John Witbrock is a computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence. Witbrock is a native of New Zealand and is the former Vice President of Research at Cycorp, which is carrying out the Cyc project in an effort to produce a gen ...

at Carnegie Mellon University.

Amiga-only features

At the time of its launch, AMosaic offered several features beyond the capabilities of Mosaic, thanks to the unique capabilities of the

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

and existing support libraries. The

Magic User Interface The Magic User Interface (MUI in short) is an object-oriented system by Stefan Stuntz to generate and maintain graphical user interfaces. With the aid of a preferences program, the user of an application has the ability to customize the system ac ...

(MUI) system used to construct the

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

enabled user full user-customization of fonts, colors, and background patterns. AMosaic makes use of AmigaOS

Datatypes In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allowed operations on it. A data type tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most progra ...

for its external and inline image decoding, making it simple for users to extend the list of supported image types by installing the appropriate operating system plugin. An

ARexx ARexx is an implementation of the Rexx language for the Amiga, written in 1987 by William S. Hawes, with a number of Amiga-specific features beyond standard REXX facilities. Like most REXX implementations, ARexx is an interpreted language. Program ...

inter-application communication interface was built into AMosaic, allowing simple scripting and transferring of data between AMosaic and other software. Using ARexx, users can write external scripts to ask AMosaic to retrieve a page and return it in

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

format, or AMosaic can execute a script calling an external bookmark tracking program. Uses the

networking software A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

DNet, AmiTCP 3.0b2, or AS225r2.

Publicity

AMosaic was featured as the cover story in the March, 1995 issue of

Amiga World ''Amiga World'' was a magazine dedicated to the Amiga computer platform. It was a prominent Amiga magazine, particularly in the United States, and was published by Massachusetts-based IDG Publishing from 1985 until April 1995. The first several iss ...

magazine. The original developers, Michael Fischer, Michael Meyer, and

, co-wrote ''User Extensibility in Amiga Mosaic'', which was presented by

at the Second International World Wide Web Conference in Chicago, Illinois, October 17–20, 1994.

System requirements

* AmigaOS 2.0 or greater * AmiTCP 3.0 beta 2 or AS225 Release 2, or DNET *

(MUI) 3.8 *

Workbench A workbench is a sturdy table at which manual work is done. They range from simple flat surfaces to very complex designs that may be considered tools in themselves. Workbenches vary in size from tiny jewellers benches to the huge benches used by ...

3 users need the ZGIF DataType to decode inlined GIF images

References

External links

AMosaic FAQ

AMosaic 1.2 and 2.0 pre-release downloads

AMosaic 2.0 pre-release source code download
{{DEFAULTSORT:Amosaic Amiga software Web browsers for AmigaOS Discontinued web browsers