John Howard at MERC

# MERC

John Howard inherited leadership of CMU's Andrew project. He now works for Mistubishi Electric, who are setting up a new research center in Cambridge. He says, quoting his company brochure,

"The charter of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) is to conduct basic research in computers and their uses. In our view, this means demonstrating entirely new categories of possibility rather than merely making incremental improvements to what is now possible. By solving fundamental problems that arise in expanding the productive use of computers, we hope to contribute to the advancement of science and society as a whole."

I gave the regular W3 talk to a group of interested people, including Les Belady, the Chairman and Director of the new lab. (The president is Tohei Nitta).

Afterward, I discussed future directions for W3 with John. John would like to see MERC start its information systems off in the right direction. There was a question of what contribution MERC could make which would make it officially acceptable for them to use W3 code from CERN and others. MERC's requirements, just like CERN's, are for Mac and X browers, and a good Provider of Information tool.

John used the Andrew system himself still (and it looked good on a good colour screen). We discussed the steps necessary to make an ez-based version of W3. Basically, the text object would have to be (slightly!) subclassed, and a subclass of the link object could be made to include the W3 library.

(Andrew funding from IBM has stopped, though the project will be kept alive at a lower level.)

## By the way

John pointed out an(other) article summarizing internet resources,

Compiled by decemj@rpi.edu (John December), Release 1.20, 4 Jun 92 Additions/corrections/comments welcome. This document is available via anonymous ftp from the host ftp.rpi.edu, file: pub/communications/internet-cmc.