Aurora Project History

On November 12, 1993, The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) made available to the public stable versions of NCSA Mosaic for Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and UNIX workstations. This WorldWide Web (WWW) client, and others like it, opened up a whole new realm of communications; since Mosaic's debut, the WWW traffic across the NSFnet backbone has grown by several million percent. Never before in the history of human electronic communication has there been such an expansion.

The Aurora Project, a proposal to use this new technology in the development of a campus-wide hypermedia information system and integrate its use into the CWRU Electronic Learning Environment, was conceived within days of Mosaic's formal public release. The proof-of-concept system was completed in December of 1993 and the initial design mock-up and implementation was done in January 1994, at which point it was demonstrated to several people on campus for conceptual feedback. The Library Information Technologies Department was then authorized to continue testing and evaluation efforts. In March 1995, the Aurora Project was selected as the official Web server of Case Western Reserve University.