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Evolution of UHINFO
by Ward Takamiya
In our lives, the Internet and the World Wide Web have been everyday
terms for only a small number of years. However, in just a few
human years, generations of change have occurred on the Internet.
UHINFO, now the main home page for the University of Hawaii (UH),
has itself done a lot of growing up over the years. Let's take
a quick tour from its humble beginnings through what it has become
today and what it will possibly be tomorrow.
Gopher It!
Circa 1992, the online information system known as UHINFO was
in development at UH by Computer Specialist Iris Takamiya of the
Office of Information Technology (OIT). She worked with individuals
at the UH Computing Center (UHCC) and the ICS Department to put
the system into production. In the educational community, this
type of access to online data was being referred to as a Campus-Wide
Information System or CWIS for short. Using a delivery method
called gopher (developed at the University of Minnesota, home
of the Golden Gophers), anyone in the world with a terminal and
access to an Internet gopher client would be able to access UHINFO.
Since gopher had a text-only, menu-driven setup, a simple terminal
or terminal emulator was all that was necessary to look up gopher
information. At this early stage, many UH users would telnet (or
connect serially via the Starmaster) to any of the UHCC's general-purpose
machines (UNIX, VAX, or IBM mainframe). After logging on, a user
might type the following at the system prompt to access UHINFO:
A quaint menu of choices would then be displayed:
Internet Gopher Information Client v0.7
Root gopher server: nic.hawaii.net
1. About UHINFO/
2. Administrative Information/
3. Around Town/
4. Campus Information/
5. Computing and Technology/
6. Employment Opportunities/
7. Library and Research Tools/
8. News and Events/
9. Other Gopher and Information Servers
10. Phone Directories/
11. Student Information/
12. University Services/
Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu Page 1/1 |
Figure 1.
The University of Hawaii developed the above organizational structure
for its gopher site and announced its release to the public in
January 1993. The system proved useful to both the UH community
and also to visitors looking for information about UH. Getting
to information could be done quickly by just using the keyboard's
cursor keys and traversing the menu. As most of the information
was contained in short text-only files, the gopher system was
ideal for finding what you wanted easily, even over slower modem
lines. However, having this text-only interface also made it visually
uninteresting. Images were not shown onscreen, but would need
to be downloaded, saved to a file, then brought up in another
application. Later versions of gopher clients that ran on a Mac
or PC eliminated the download step for retrieving images, but
text and graphics could not be shown on the same screen.
At this point in history, a vast majority of departments did not
maintain their own information online so the UHINFO gopher caretakers
used data from various sources of information -- often hand-keying
in text from printed material such as the UH Manoa Graduate and Undergraduate Catalog and the Student Handbook. Other items of interest were maintained
by the UHINFO gopher keepers, including some news, events, documents,
weekly UH Bulletins (precursor to Ku Lama), career placement information, employment opportunities, Business
Affairs Circulars, computer price lists, and site license (DEC
UHTEI, Lotus Multiple Choice Program, WordPerfect) information.
Also, other non-academic items were being maintained such as the
Consolidated Movie listing, the bus schedules, the Campus Center
dining room menu, and weather reports. There were links to online
publications like Zen and the Art of the Internet and the Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Internet. There was also something called an "Internet
Hunt," a weekly "scavenger hunt" that asked people to find answers
to a bunch of questions using only the Internet as a reference
tool.
Dawn of the Web
In the first half of 1993, the first versions of Mosaic -- the grandfather of current Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator
and Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- were released to the Internet
community by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). At Honolulu Community College (HCC), Dr. Kenneth Hensarling of the Academic Computer Services
and his staff quickly embraced the World Wide Web and set up what
was to be the first Web server in Hawaii in May 1993. HCC's Dinosaur Exhibit, an online Web tour through the college's collection of prehistoric
artifacts and replicas, proved to be a wonderful example of using
the exciting new Web technology. Another early example included
a campus map where a user could click on a building to see a photo
of the building and obtain information about the departments and
offices within the building. There were also early examples of
sound and video on the site.
Reservations, Please?
The UHINFO gopher caretakers were, of course, very impressed by
this newfangled invention. However, they felt that the majority
of the University of Hawaii users would be unable to make full
use of this new technology. Many did not have the requisite operating
system or network connection on campus to run a graphical Internet
client like a Web browser. The UH Computing Center suggested that
users purchase 66MHz 486 PCs with 8MB RAM as the minimum hardware
or 75MHz Pentiums with 16MB RAM as the "recommended" configuration.
A very large number of users still connected to the mainframes
and minicomputers through the Starmaster (PACX) serial connections.
File transfers using kermit were still commonplace. PPP and SLIP
connections for dial-up were only just becoming available through
the new 14,400 bps modem pool. In addition, the UHINFO gopher
had recently been mentioned in a Sam's Book and was rated as an
excellent example of organization of online material. In all,
since we could not alienate the current users and since Mosaic
could also connect to the UHINFO gopher system, why do double
work by creating and maintaining two separate information bases?
The proud Gopher was not ready to be abandoned -- at least not
yet.
Kaboom!
In a short year's time, with Web technology and user awareness
mounting, the decision was finally made to update UHINFO for the
Web. Information Technology Services was formed (which combined
OIT, UHCC, the Management Systems Office, and the Telecom Office);
PPP dialups were firmly established and being recommended to the
UH community; and more offices than ever were now wired to the
campus Ethernet. Now, a variety of Web browsers were available
with NCSA's Mosaic still in the lead. A text-only Web browser,
called Lynx, was also available for those with less robust systems.
So after a lot of thought and a flurry of hard work, UHINFO for
the Web was announced in the fall of 1994. The first incarnation
was simple and essentially a "webified" version of the UHINFO
Gopher (see Figure 2), but as with any major Web site, there was
constant improvement.
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Figure 2. Original UHINFO in 1994
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Figure 3. Update in 1995
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Figure 4. Update in 1997
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Figure 5. Current look released in mid-1998
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At this time, the Internet was still primarily a government and
educational network and things moved along fairly quickly as more
and more government agencies, universities, colleges, and schools
around the nation and the world joined the network. Once the Internet
went "commercial" in 1995 and traditional dial-up systems like
Compuserve, America Online, and Prodigy began to provide Internet
access, users demanded much more -- faster speeds, better looking
and better designed sites, e-commerce, and better customer support.
Educational sites, like UHINFO, also needed to become more customer-oriented
in order to keep up and we learned both from our own personal
experiences and the world around us about what makes a site good
(or bad!). Fortunately, innovative companies and smart people
provided the tools (Web servers and browsers, HTML editors, etc.)
to help us do the necessary work a little more easily.
Today, most UH departments have their own home pages. Many smaller
departments chose to use space on ITS servers for their home pages
instead of setting up and maintaining their own servers. Forerunners
who brought up their own independent Web servers included all
the individual UH campuses and some of the larger departments
with their own computer support staff, including the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST), Summer Session (now the Outreach College), and the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources (CTAHR). Web-based applications are prevalent. It is now possible
for students at UH Manoa to register online with PA`E. The UH Bookstores sell merchandise from their site. UH Athletics now sells tickets for sporting events online.
What's Next for UHINFO?
The look of UHINFO has been constantly overhauled (see Figures
3-5) on the average of every year-and-a-half since the original
release in 1994. Major top-level categories have been added (and
removed) as needed and "must have" features such as the site search,
campus map, and online phone directory make it easier to find
people and things. A brand-new look and reorganization is currently
being developed for release this year. Keep an eye out for it!
The Internet and the Web (and UHINFO!) are still in its adolescent
stages, with a lot of maturing to do. There will be many exciting
changes ahead in the way we work and play online and you can rest
assured that UHINFO will be keeping pace with those changes. It
should be interesting to revisit this topic a few years from now
and see how much further we'll have progressed. There is no telling
what UHINFO will become, but it will definitely be a fascinating
journey along the way. |
