User:Slworona/sandbox
parking place -----
Computers started as tools for scientists and engineers, acquired and operated by large corporations and government agencies. Their purpose was to perform calculations too large or complex to do by hand. Financial and other administrative tasks were eventually added to the repertoire. Even when computers evolved from mainframes to personal computers, the primary function was computation, statistical analysis, simulation. With the marriage of computers to early networks and ultimately the Intenet, the use of computers for information distribution moved computers from tools of corporations to tools used by individual citizens. The computer itself has now morphed into a ubiquitous hand-held communication device. Along the way, a number of key developments can be identified. One was the Campus-Wide Information System, the CWIS. With a CWIS, a college or university allowed part of the institution’s investment in digital technology to be used for the benefit of the entire campus community and not just the scientists and engineers. Before deployment of a CWIS, only a tiny percentage of the campus population would have had reason to even know that an institution owned a computer. The CWIS was the first time the entire campus community came in contact with that technology. The first CWISes were primitive, operating on campus mainframes and delivering their content via dedicated terminals such as VT100s or 3270s. Since most campus residents did not have their own mainframe accounts and could not log in to the central system, CWISes operated on “kiosks” deployed in public areas. The systems tended to be organized around hierarchical menu structures organizing a relatively small collection of information. A CWIS might typically provide bus schedules, dining-hall menus, and operating hours for libraries and other campus facilities. As the utility and popularity of CWISes grew, various campuses began projects to create more powerful and more flexible software to operate the CWIS. Other campuses, becoming aware of these developments, became testbeds. CWIS-related developments took place on a number of dimensions. Two key dimensions were user-interface software, such as gopher, and information-discovery systems, such as Archie and WAIS. The culmination of these developments can be considered the Web, with a protocol providing for universal and expandable specification of a network-wide collection of information resources with a user interface designed, developed, and deployed without regard to how and where those information resources were developed and maintained. Time-Line
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I'm struggling to come up with a sentence (maybe for the end of the WWW paragraph) that sums up the significance of the CWIS era. Here's a stab at it:
"The CWIS period (1982-1995) can be seen as a pre-web testbed in which campuses innovated remote electronic content delivery by adapting new technologies for their relatively novelty-tolerant, Internet-curious audiences."
Please update your contact information for me with my new email address: [email protected]. My ucop.edu addresses will stop working in July 2022.
On Sat, Jun 25, 2022 at 8:42 PM John Kunze <[email protected]> wrote:
Hey Steve,
I promised some sentences to seed a wikipedia page. Here's some text in quasi-markdown. Let me know what you think!
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a Campus-Wide Information System (CWIS) was a pre-web, networked information system that an educational institution provided for the benefit of its students, staff, and faculty. Most CWISs were run with custom software on centralized campus computers (eg, mainframes). They were accessed with terminals via modem or hardwired campus connections in libraries, kiosks, offices, etc.of educational institutions. CWIS information was also often available via network protocols such as
The first CWIS was CUInfo, appeared at Columbia University in 1982, which ... There was also the Princeton Network News (PNN), appeared at Princeton University in 19??, which ...
... other notable instances?
As interest grew in high speed networking for higher education (eg, formation of CNI), CWISs began incorporating search tools and protocols, such as Archie and WAIS. The Infocal CWIS, which appeared at the University of California Berkeley in 199? (xxx ref), implemented the Z39.50 protocol in order to interoperate directly with library catalogs on the internet.
The number of CWISs grew rapidly with (xxx back this up?) the release of the University of Minnesota's Gopher protocol and software. The open source Gopher software was easy to install and allowed many educational institutions to set up their own CWISs without having to write software. Gopher also allowed users to follow links from one CWIS server to other (gopher-based) CWIS server, running on campus or anywhere on the internet. With release of Gopher search services such as Veronica in 1992 and Jughead in 1993, a new CWIS could be set up easily and without writing custom software.
The
There was an email discussion list, CWIS-L i... ( https://groups.google.com/g/bit.listserv.cwis-l/c/Edton76AKDQ?hl=en#bc8a60ab89926a4bja, xxx is this archive at risk?)
There was also a CWIS journal (xxx see Howard Strauss citation) ...
There was also a CWISP protocol ...
possible supporting material ----
(wikip lists as first reason for decline of gopher -- interesting comment, as I recall similar stupid licensing attempts at UC) In February 1993, the University of Minnesota announced that it would charge licensing fees for the use of its implementation of the Gopher server.[10][9] Users became concerned that fees might also be charged for independent implementations.[11][12] Gopher expansion stagnated, to the advantage of the World Wide Web, to which CERN disclaimed ownership.[13] In September 2000, the University of Minnesota re-licensed its Gopher software under the GNU General Public License.[14]
(from CNI wikip page) In 1990, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Educom, and CAUSE joined together to form CNI to create a collaborative project focused on high speed networking that would integrate the interests of academic and research libraries (ARL) and computing in higher education (Educom and CAUSE).
(Book where "CWIS" appears) How the Web was Born; The Story of the World Wide Web
By James M. Gillies, James Gillies, James and Cailliau Robert Gillies, R. Cailliau; 2000
Citation (paywalled) Strauss, H. (1996), "What, the CWIS is dead?", Campus-Wide Information Systems, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 13-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/10650749610119370
Contributors to ask: Mark McCahill ... ??