Electronic Mosaic article submission in Science
There were in fact days when even technical powerhouses like the American Association for the Advancement of Science did things the old-fashioned way. Typed or word processed manuscripts shuttled among publisher, author and reviewers via the U.S. Postal Service. With the proliferation of email and networking, that had begun to change by August 1994 when Science magazine published its first article submitted electronically.
“NCSA Mosaic and the World Wide Web: Global Hypermedia Protocols for the Internet,” by NCSA’s Bruce Schatz and Joseph Hardin, outlined the technology that made possible the Web’s explosion in popularity. As the article explained, a lot of that increased interest had to do with the new way people conceived of the process as the result of the new hardware:
“Originally intended as a distributed network of computers, [the Internet] is increasingly viewed instead as a distributed space of information. Rather than transferring files between computers, a user navigates an information space of distributed items of information. The users concentrate on the logical structure of the interconnection of information and data items rather than on the underlying physical structure of computer and communications systems. Formation of the Internet relied critically on standard network protocols and simple universal services. Similarly, new protocols and services have evolved to support this new logical structure of interconnected information spread across the worldwide network, a global hypermedia system.”