Greetings -

Welcome to "A Unique Assemblage," the CD-ROM companion to Carl Malamud's "A World's Fair for the Global Village," MIT Press (Cambridge: 1998).

If you already have your standard Internet software, installed, you might want to go straight to our opening sequence, which is on the top of this disc in the file:

If you want more details about the software required, then read on.

We assume you have a standard Internet web browser, compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 (and up) or Netscape Navigator 3.0 (and up).

If you do not have this software, we have provided copies. If you are on a Macintosh, double-click on the file on the top of this disc which is called Macintosh Install.

If you are on Windows 95 or Windows NT, double-click on the file on the top of this disc which is called Windows Setup.

On a Unix system, go read the readme.unix.txt file in the /Software directory.

We assume that your system has at least 8 megabytes of RAM, and 16 megabytes will definitely make things go smoother. We assume you have at least a 2x CD-ROM drive, but a 4x will make things go a little smoother, particularly the opening sequence.

All of our software works inside of your web browser. We assume that your browser can handle the following features:

    tables
    frames
    Java (version 1.02)
    Javascript (version 1.0, which is for both MSIE and Netscape)

We also use a variety of additional data types, which your browser should be able to handle. Note that even if you can't do all of these data types, you can still see most of the disc. Our software for Windows and Macintosh can support all of these:

Note for Quicktime movies: some of our movies are very big, up to 40 megabytes each. If you are running Netscape, you might consider turning off caching which will make some of the screens run more quickly. We've had a real problem in the beta test period Netscape and caching. If your browser settings just won't cut it, you might consider opening up a file manager and viewing the movies directly with a Quicktime Movie Player.

Note for Shockwave movies: if you are running Microsoft Internet Explorer, it considers an attempt to read a Shockwave file from a local file to be "running a program." If you have Security turned up high in your Options, MSIE will not run the file. If you set your security to medium, it will ask you each time. If you set your security to low, the file will simply run. Don't forget to turn security back up before you start surfing the net.