owner=Michael Grobe
%%owner_address=grobe@ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
%%owner_info=University of Kansas, Academic Computing Services
link_delimiter=<


		       Lynx Development History

Lynx grew  out of efforts  to  build a campus-wide  information system
(CWIS)   at   The   University of  Kansas.  Lynx    clients  provide a
user-friendly hypertext interface for users on  a variety of platforms
(UN*X, VMS,  and MS-DOS), and  allow information  providers to publish
information located on  any platform   that can run  a   Gopher server
(including  UN*X,  VMS, VM/CMS   and  Macintosh).     Providers retain
complete control over their information, but  may receive comments and
suggestions  from  users  running Lynx on  client  systems.  The major
limitation of using Lynx in  this environment is  that Lynx  currently
supports only textual information.

At The University of Kansas, Lynx is used in several different ways to
give users access to  a campus-wide information  system.  First, it is
run  on  several local clients  from   a  script named "kufacts"   (or
something similar) that points to the starting file located on a local
server.  Second, it runs whenever a  user logs  into an account called
"kufacts" on  a system named  kufacts.cc.ukans.edu.  Users  without  a
local account may use this system to explore Lynx.

Lynx was designed by Lou Montulli, Charles Rezac  and Michael Grobe of
Academic Computing Services  at  The University of Kansas.    Lynx was
implemented by  Lou Montulli  with  code contributed by  Earl Fogel of
Computing Services at the University  of Saskatchewan, who implemented
HYPEREZ in the UN*X environment, by  the  authors of  the  UN*X Gopher
client, and   by Vijay    Kolli, of   The  University  of Kansas,  who
implemented the  VT100 translation  to  curses that is   required  for
remote program execution (by programs  started via rexec, inetd, or by
direct socket  connects).   Neal Erdwien, of Kansas  State University,
demonstrated the use of electronic mail  to let users communicate with
information providers in his UNICORN system.

This  document was  written  by Michael  Grobe, who may be reached for
comments at grobe@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu.




