WASD VMS Hypertext Services -Technical Overview

1 - Introduction

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This document provides an basic overview of the WASD VMS Hypertext Services. All programs were designed only to specifically comply with the requirements of DEC-C, within a Compaq TCP/IP Services for VMS environment, or compatible.

The document assumes a basic understanding of the hypertext technologies and uses terms without explaining them (e.g. HTTP, HTML, URL, CGI, SSI, etc.) The reader is refered to documents specifically on these topics.

Also see WASD Hypertext Services - Environment Overview containing a description of WASD Web author facilities, and the WASD Hypertext Services - Scripting Overview for information on CGI, CGIplus, ISAPI, OSU, etc., scripting.

It is strongly suggested those using printed versions of this document also access the Hypertext version. It provides online demonstrations of some concepts.


Objectives

The primary impetus for an internal Web environment was a 1993 decision by Wide Area Surveillance Division (WASD) management (then High Frequency Radar Division, HFRD) to make as much information as possible, both administrative and research, available online (to use the current term ... an intranet). Early experimentation with a Gopher implementation soon made way for the obvious advantages of the emerging Web technology.

It then became the objective of this author to make all of our systems' VMS-related resources available via HTTP and HTML, regardless of the underlying data or storage format. An examination of the WASD package will show that this objective is substantially achieved.


Reasons For Yet Another Web Package

Reasons for developing a local HTTP server were few but compelling:


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