TAPPING INTO OLYMPICS STATISTICS

Available Online Via the Internet

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- February 16, 1994 -- You're at your computer and you just have to know who won the men's 30-kilometer cross-country race at the `94 Winter Olympics. Lillehammer is a long way away and it might not be polite to blast the TV or radio in the office. If you're on the Internet, you can call up all the statistics, medal standings, schedules, late-breaking stories and weather conditions for the winter games taking place this week and next in Norway.

This is the first time Olympics results have been immediately available on the Internet. This Olympics project is a joint effort company; NTB-Norsk Telegrambyra, a Norwegian news wire service;

Olympics statistics and related information are being posted by NTB to the World Wide Web, a vast array of data within the Internet located on computers all over the globe. A Sun(R) computer "server" at for Olympics data. A high-performance SPARCserver(TM) 1000 at Sun's Mountain View headquarters is "mirroring" the information in order to accommodate the enormous request for Olympics statistics from computer users worldwide. There were more than 100,000 requests for Olympics information in just the first day of service in Oslo, which began February 13. Since the SPARCserver 1000 in California came on-line, there have been approximately 6,000 connections per hour, with 32,000 pages of information per hour being retrieved. This is expected to increase. Users are applauding the service for up-to-the-minute statistics with more details than those available from television or newspapers.

Internet Channel-Surfing Made Easy

For many Internet users, getting these Olympics statistics is as easy as clicking their mouse button. Just a few months ago, navigating around the world's largest computer network, the Internet, meant learning about file transfer protocols and other arcane computer jargon. But thanks to new graphical front-end applications for the Web such as Cello and -- most notably -- Mosaic, information is visual and instantly accessible.

Mosaic is a graphical tool developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and available at no charge. Using Mosaic, a user can simply call up a document related to the Olympics that may include images, graphics and sound files. What's more, the user can browse through a series of files using the "hypertext" tools that are making Mosaic such an enormous hit across the network. Any word highlighted in a document indicates a related file on the subject. Pointing and clicking on the highlighted word automatically calls up the related document.

Sun, the world's leading supplier of RISC-based, UNIX workstations, servers and related technology, has been closely involved with the Internet for years. According to statistics, more than 70 percent of the traffic on the Internet is handled on Sun computer servers. The Internet is considered by many to be the "network of networks" and a forerunner to the promised Information Highway. On any given day, 15 million users connect in more than 50 countries. Usage is increasing at a rate of 15 percent a month. Via the Internet, information on everything from recipes to quantum physics is available at university, government and corporate servers open to the public, including many sites that are part of the World Wide Web.

Mosaic is copyrighted but available at no charge for noncommercial use. It can be obtained on the Internet by completing a file transfer protocol (FTP) to "ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu." It is also available on floppy disk in both Apple- and IBM-compatible formats (for a fee of approximately $30), by writing to: Software Development Group, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, 605 East Springfield, Ave., Champaign, Illinois, 61280.

Mosaic users with a search tool can connect to the U.S. server supplying information on the Olympic Games simply by typing in "olympics," or entering the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), "http://www.sun.com," into their Mosaic viewer. For connection to the Sun server in Norway, type: "http://ol.oslonett.no/OL/OL94.html."

supplier of open network computing solutions, is an operating company of Computer," SMCC's SPARC(R)/Solaris(R) workstation and server family leads the UNIX market. The company has its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

SPARC trademarks, including the SCD Compliant logo, are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. SPARCserver is Inc. All other product or service names mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

Results from The 1994 Winter Olympics are distributed to the Internet in a joint effort by

and Norsk Telegrambyrå.

Press Release was HTMLified, Feb 23 1994, 18:09:18 MET, Steinar Kjærnsrød