Tools and Procedures Used To Create This Web Site

Procedures

Many of the procedures followed in creating this web site are described in the following short article:

`Philosophy and the World Wide Web'

Software

The local production of the hypertext, graphics, DVI, PS, and sound files served from this web site required the following application programs:

OmniWeb.app, for web browsing and inspecting local HTML documents.
OmniImage.app, for displaying TIFF, GIF, and XBM files, and for converting TIFF files into the GIF format
Emacs.app (front-end) and gnuemacs (with auctex and html modes), for editing text in LaTeX and HTML sourcefiles
NeXTTeX, for processing LaTeX sourcefiles into DVI files
TeXView.app, a NeXT application for displaying DVI files
latex2html, a Unix utility for converting previously existing LaTeX sourcefiles files into HTML sourcefiles
dvips, a utility for converting DVI files into PS files
Stuart.app, a terminal-window application for the NeXT used to execute dvips and latex2html from the command line.
Sound.app, a NeXT demo application for recording and playback of SND files at the console
Grab.app, a NeXT application that captures material displayed to screen (such as the LaTeX DVI files displayed by TeXView) as TIFF files
GatorFTP.app, for graphical FTP to Internet FTP sites.
NewsGrazer.app, for reading NeXT and WWW newsgroups (e.g. comp.graphics) in the pursuit of answers to questions
Opener.app, for on-the-fly uncompressing of compressed files retrieved via OmniWeb

Hardware and Operating System

Our WWW site was originally created in December 1994 on the machine mally.stanford.edu, which was then a NeXTStation Color Turbo with 128 MB RAM, a 2 GB Seagate internal hard drive, a 1 GB Seagate external hard drive, and a CD-ROM drive. This machine ran the NeXTSTEP 3.3 (Unix/Mach) operating system, a multi-tasking operating system with a graphical interface. The multi-user operating system allows each user to create a large number of files in a variety of formats in an efficient manner. While constructing the site, all of the applications described above were open and running (all except the `current' one were open in the background). Whenever a lengthy task was set in motion in one application, work would nevertheless proceed simply by clicking into the window of some other application.

mally.stanford.edu is now an Apple M1 Mac Studio, and runs macOS 14.x (Sonoma), which is a descendent of the NeXTSTEP operating system.

Off-Site Hardware and Software

The photographic images were digitized with the HP Scanner maintained by CSLI Publications. CSLI Publications drives the scanner with a PowerMac that is connected to CSLI's local area network. OmniPaint scanned and saved the photographs as TIFF files, and these files were then downloaded to mally.stanford.edu using Fetch.