The WAIS-using Macintosh community owes a tremendous debt of gratitude to Harry Mangalam <mangalam@uci.edu> for recreating the Info-Mac WAIS databases that disappeared when Thinking Machines took down their public WAIS server. According to Harry, Thinking Machines may yet revive their service, but Harry took it upon himself to use some extra disk space and re-index the available postings.

This new incarnation of Info-Mac is in a slightly different form - it's split into two databases, one for 1992-1994 and one for 1995 exclusively:

     info-mac       Volumes 10-12 (1992-1994 inclusive)
     info-mac95     Volume 13 (1995)

Via the World-Wide Web, you can access the new Info-Mac databases through this URL:

http://hornet.mmg.uci.edu/~hjm/projects/ sgi.wais.html

Or you can use direct WAIS URLs to get to the databases:

wais://ih34.hsis.uci.edu:210/info-mac?query boolean query ...
wais://ih34.hsis.uci.edu:210/info-mac95?query boolean query ...

If you use Netscape Navigator to access these databases, you must configure a WAIS proxy in your Netscape preferences. You can use the same host that the Info-Mac databases live on (<ih34.hsis.uci.edu>, port 80), but Harry warns that the proxy jump can be slow - as long as minutes - although I've had no particular trouble getting through this way. NCSA Mosaic for the Mac doesn't support WAIS queries yet, and EINet's MacWeb will try to launch MacWAIS, available in Info-Mac mirror sites. You can also look into the freeware collection maintained at WAIS, Inc. for WAIS clients for other platforms.

ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/comm/tcp/ mac-wais-129.hqx
ftp://ftp.wais.com/pub/freeware/mac/

For those looking to make their own Info-Mac sources in a WAIS client program (such as MacWAIS), you can use this to construct a WAIS "src" file for the databases. Change the field "database-name" from "info-mac" to "info-mac95" to access the 1995 articles.

  (:source
   :version  3
   :ip-address "128.200.5.34"   :ip-name "ih34.hsis.uci.edu"   :tcp-port 210
   :database-name "info-mac"   :maintainer "mangalam@uci.edu"   :description
   "Harry's test infomac server
    The info-mac digest from info-mac@sumex-aim.stanford.edu"   )

Thanks again, Harry - we owe you one!