Subject: Prelimary announcment of ELECTRONIC COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY CONFERENCE

From: [email-masked] (Steven Bachrach)
Date: Tue, 17 May 94 15:03:16 -0500

PRE-ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE FIRST 

           COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY

            ELECTRONIC CONFERENCE

As part of a project to explore the use of the Internet for 
distribtuing chemical information, sponsored by the 
Henry and Camille Dreyfus Foundation, we wish to announce 
the first Computational Chemistry Electronic Conference.

This is just a preliminary announcement to get people thinking of
the possibilities of an electronic conference and inspire them
to contribute and participate. The full announcement will appear
in June, 1994, with abstracts due Sep 30, 1994. The Conference
will take place during the first two weeks of November 1994.

The conference will feature papers in any area of computational
chemistry. This includes electronic structure, conformational
analysis, QSAR, drug design, molecular dynamics, and molecular
mechanics, but is not limited to this small list.

A critical feature will be the ability of all registrants to view 
the papers, including text and graphics. To facilitate this process,
the conference will be run using the World Wide Web (WWW) and the 
Mosiac viewer. The WWW is a hypertext-based file retrieval system.
It operates using the HTML (hypertext markup language protocol) to
format text and allow for imbedded graphics. More details
on preparing HTML papers and providing for their universal
access will be in the full announcement. To encourage participation,
we suggest that everyone who is not familiar with WWW obtain the
Mosaic viewer. Mosaic was developed at the NCSA in Urbana. It can
be obtained from the NCSA by anonymous ftp to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu and
looking in the Web directory. However, getting into the NCSA ftp
site has become difficult, so we have the Mosaic program available
for many computer systems (Unix boxes including SGI, Sun, DEC, and 
IBM), Macintosh, and Windows) on our anonymous ftp site at
hackberry.chem.niu.edu and look in the /pub/Mosaic directory.
You will notice that there are some other utilities available 
besides Mosaic. These include viewers for examining graphics and
movies. Mosaic will launch these programs as needed to view graphics
and movies. One other note is that most of these codes have been
compressed. The unix codes have been compressed with gzip, which is
available in the /pub/Mosaic/Unix/utilities directory. The Mac
versions have been binhexed and stuffed using Stuff-it. The 
Windows versions have been compressed by pkzip which is also onsite.

We encourage you to test out the great power and ease of use of Mosaic
and the WWW, and then to participate in the conference this
November. More information will be forthcoming!

Steven Bachrach
Department of Chemistry
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, Il 60115
[email-masked]