---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 11:47:34 -0800
From: Brendan Kehoe <brendan@nospam.zen.org>
To: zenlist@nospam.zen.org
Subject: Christmas greets the Net once again
[Feel free to send this on to whomever you think may be interested...I thought
it would be of interest to folks who'd read Zen and gotten started on the Net.
I'm afraid some folks don't have access to Mosaic or other WWW tools yet, but
you can still do all of the email stuff, and possibly the finger.]
Last year, the front page of the Christmas Day New York Times talked about how
you could do `finger xmastree@nospam.cygnus.com' to find out the current state of the
Christmas tree in the offices of Cygnus Support.
Well, it's back again this year. But, we wouldn't want you to be bored! "Oh,
ho hum, that same boring thing all over again...been there, saw that." So to
follow the example of a few million enthusiasts, the increasingly-popular
World Wide Web is now toting its very own Christmas tree, which is so
interactive it's almost like it's in your home. (Well, not quite. But if
you'd like to send some wrapped gifts, I'm sure we wouldn't be upset.)
If you connect to the URL `http://www.cygnus.com/xmastree' with whatever web
browser you use (Mosaic, netscape, et al.), you will find something to help
you take part in the holiday season. Along with getting to look at a small
photo of the tree when you first connect to it, you may:
* Choose to see a full-size version of that picture; they are updated every
two minutes.
* Choose to watch an MPEG movie of the tree which is 20 frames long, so you
can watch the lights blink, etc. This is updated every fifteen minutes.
* You can now vote on the different features of the tree, and every fifteen
minutes the system will do the vote count and change the tree accordingly.
* If you want a holiday card, send mail to `xmastree@nospam.cygnus.com'.
* The web page also offers the ability to send any one of ten random cards
to a given email address.
* You can also find out the technical details of how it was done, if you're
really that interested in it.
If you have any comments, suggestions, or complaints (come to think of it, you
can keep the complaints), write to `webmaster@nospam.cygnus.com'. Oh, I should
mention that this project was done by a number of people at Cygnus, with Jason
Molenda (crash@nospam.cygnus.com) being the principal architect and designer of it.
Oh, the fourth edition of Zen, due out towards the end of the Spring, will be
including, among other new things (not enough to make it more than 250 pages
or so, I'm praying) a new chapter about the World Wide Web and how you can use
it.
The January 1995 issue of `Internet World' lists the Cygnus Christmas Tree of
last year first in their "Best Hookups" section of the "Best and Worst of 1994"
section.
For everyone at Cygnus, we hope you enjoy the holidays!
-- Brendan Kehoe brendan@nospam.zen.org