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So Hard to Say Good-bye: UWIN Retires

Ian Taylor, Manager, C&C Client Services, and (formerly) UWIN Manager

After almost seven years of sterling service to the UW community and beyond, the University of Washington Information Navigator (UWIN) will be retired at the end of June 1999. All the information resources that appeared in UWIN are now available through the UW home page at www.washington.edu

Innovative for Its Time

UWIN was developed during 1991-92, at a time when campuswide information systems were just emerging at universities across the nation and around the world. These were all text-only systems, many of them using the Gopher protocol. Compare Gopher to the Web and consider the remarkable changes that have since taken place in digital communication.

The UWIN development team saw the advantages of a standard protocol like Gopher, but were able to provide us with a superior interface and improved response by some innovative local creativity. In cooperation with the UW Libraries, C&C staff also developed Wilco, a uniform interface to the UW Catalog and other bibliographic resources, to run within UWIN.

The result has been a solidly reliable, very useful and user-friendly system that many of us say farewell to with difficulty. But the fact is that UWIN's time has passed. The Web is the future, and the future is here.

Thanks to UWIN Developers and Managers

It is appropriate now to acknowledge and thank the numerous individuals who made and managed UWIN:

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University of Washington Computing & Communications
Windows on Computing, No. 23, Spring 1999
newsltr@cac.washington.edu