Written in C Platform Amiga Initial release date 25 December 1993 Programming languages C Downloadable Discontinued | Operating system Type Web browser Stable release 2 Development status Discontinued | |
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Website mfischer.com/legacy/amosaic Developers Michael Witbrock, Michael Fischer, Michael Meyer | ||
AMosaic is an Amiga port of the Mosaic web browser, 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 or NCSA. It was developed by Michael Fischer at Stony Brook University, Michael Meyer at the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Witbrock at Carnegie Mellon University. The first version was released to the public on December 25, 1993, and the last version available was a 2.0 prerelease.
Contents
As is the case for other versions of Mosaic worldwide, AMosaic is no longer updated or supported. It has, however, been ported to the AmigaOS source compatible AROS operating system. The developers of AMosaic went on to develop IBrowse, which was in development until December 2006.
Version 1.4 is required to use forms.
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 and existing support libraries.
The Magic User Interface (MUI) system used to construct the user interface enabled user full user-customization of fonts, colors, and background patterns.
AMosaic makes use of AmigaOS Datatypes 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 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 format, or AMosaic can execute a script calling an external bookmark tracking program.
Uses the networking software DNet, AmiTCP 3.0b2, or AS225r2.
Publicity
AMosaic was featured as the cover story in the March, 1995 issue of Amiga World magazine.
The original developers, Michael Fischer, Michael Meyer, and Michael Witbrock, co-wrote User Extensibility in Amiga Mosaic, which was presented by Michael Witbrock at the Second International World Wide Web Conference in Chicago, Illinois, October 17–20, 1994.