Activities of the distributed computing group (circa 1990 - 2004)

• Wide-Area Networking activities related to KANREN, the Great Plains Network, and Internet2,
• Campus-wide Web activity, having created and operated the official KU web site for the first 4 years of its existence ("even before there WAS a Web"), while developing numerous Web-related services, applications, tutorials and classes,
• High-performance computing involving our local supercomputing facilities as well as access to remote facilities,
• Outreach activities related to high-performance computing and networking (such as mounting the KU computing demonstrations for the Kansas Technology Showcase in 1999 and 2000), and
• Supporting networked media activities around campus by operating
  • one of the KU Access Grid video conferencing nodes,
  • video related servers (Real, Windows Media, eShare, etc.),
  • H.323-based video conferencing equipment, and
  • developing a strategy for deploying and supporting networked media services at KU and throughout Kan-ed.

In the world at large, the Distributed Computing group was best known as the birthplace of Lynx, the curses-based World-Wide Web (WWW) browser, which was one of the first 4 or 5 World Wide Web browsers ever built and is available on literally millions of computers worldwide.

For a more complete history of the early devlopment of Lynx see: http://people.cc.ku.edu/~grobe/early-lynx.html.