http://www.cs.ubc.ca/ (PC Press Internet CD, 03/1996)
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UBC Computer Science Home Page

This is the World Wide Web home page for the University of British Columbia Computer Science Department. The weary cyberspace traveller might like to know that we're located in beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Since we were the first HTTP server in BC, you may have come here expecting to find the University of British Columbia or the province of British Columbia. Fortunately, you can get there from here.

Paths to all the nooks and crannies of this web can be found here. They're broken down into major categories and presented in a narrative style. If that doesn't appeal to you, there's a menu-style list of everything here.

Computer Science Department

You can read a little about the department and see the people behind it and what they do. Several of our research groups maintain their own webs. There's LCI (Computational Intelligence), Imager/GraFiC (Computer Graphics), E-GEMS (Electronic Games for Education), SCV (Scientific Computation and Visualization), DSG (Distributed Operating Systems) MAGIC (Media And Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre), and DBSL (Database Systems Laboratory). Technical reports on the research done in the department are available on-line. We have a web server just for our undergraduates which is mostly directed at them but contains some general interest material.

There are many different ways, electronic and otherwise, to contact the department. If you'd like to apply for graduate school here, we have some application forms available. There are other forms for internal use and a list of upcoming department events. Or you can create your own customized list.

Check out our list of seminars and speaker series featuring people from the department and around the world.

The department is involved in CICSR, the Centre for Integrated Computer Systems Research.

Using and Building the World Wide Web

For those of you just starting to use WWW, there are some hints on using your Web browser. After that you may want to learn about HTML, the lingua franca of the web. Or you can just jump right in and find out how to make your documents available to the world. There's a few other things our server allows like adding to your userinfo page.

There are web browsers for the Macintosh and the PC. You can even read about setting up your own HTTP server, but CS people probably don't need to go to the trouble.

Facilities

The department's computers consistly largely of UNIX workstations with some Macintoshes and PCs lying around. There's lots more to say about the facilities, but no one has written something down to reference. Some system documentation like the software catalog, UNIX manual pages and GNU emacs texinfo is on line.

Library

The department has its own reading room, but you should take a look at the list of electronic jounals and other on-line information. Besides all that, we've got the meagre beginnings of a virtual library including such things as:

The UBC library has its own telnet-based card catalog to which we've hacked up a reasonably spiffy way of finding what books you have due.

Gateways and Special Services

We have some gateways to USENET news and anonymous FTP that are must sees. The first is a multi-part article decoding service -- it tramps through various newsgroups hourly; finds multi-part or encoded articles like images, sounds, shar files and the like; and assembles them into an easy to view and easy to download form. The second is a gateway to our anonymous FTP archives at ftp.cs.ubc.ca and features the ability to browse straight into zip files without having to load them entirely over to your site.

The open government mirror is a copy of the web created by Industry Canada to explain some of the whos and hows of Canadian government.

And then there's Mr. Spock quotes.

This Web Server

A few documents here refer specifically to this server. Some daily and hourly usage statistics are available along with a list of what's new here.

UBC, BC and the World

If you're looking for UBC related information, starting with our list of UBC information servers may help. Our teeny British Columbia page will guide you to many other web servers in province.

Looking for something but don't know where to start? Two suggestions come to mind. First is the Internet Resources Meta-Index which has a bunch of possible starting points mostly consisting of searchs and some subject indicies. Second is the collection of USENET FAQs. It's essentially the collected wisdom of many USENET groups whose topics are quite diverse. It's much more useful than it sounds.

-- George Phillips (phillips@cs.ubc.ca).