,
we do not have a web site. While it was understandable since at the time
of the founding of HUAAN the web technology was still sprouting,
further developments in this area made our alumni feel that lacking an alumni
web site was no longer excusable, as alumni organizations of several other
major universities in China had established their web sites.
The good thing was that the alumni of HUST,
the Huazhong (Central China) University of Science and Technolog
, lack no talants.
Upon the email call in May 1995 on HUAAN email network, several people
set up their own sites for HUAAN: including the site at New York by Dr. XXX,
and the one by Yidao Cai at http://www.neurophys.wisc.edu/~cai/hust/.
The Wisconsin site
was created on May 19, 1995, and it included some
HUAAN documents and pictures of HUST from Dr. Cai's personal collection.
In September, this site was appointed as the official HUAAN site.
One major function of our web site is the easy access of the alumni information. When HUAAN was established, the information was sent by email and stored in its raw form. When the alumni information was added on the web site in September 1995, Dr. Cai wrote two small programs to reformat the information so that it looks nicer on the web page. One of the program was CNLIST, and it now turns into a powerful tool for managing the alumni information and automatically generating/updating the ~100 web pages every week. The other program, CKMAIL, serves as a link between the system email program and CNLIST. This program also generate some automatic reply messages so that to reduce the burden on the list maintainer.
Before the end of 1995, web pages for fill information on line and search request were added. But due to system constraints, the requests were sent by email and then processed by CKMAIL and CNLIST. Earlier (or about the same time, could not recall), Dr. HU Xiangan wrote a CGI script to process the online-filled information. Although Dr. Hu's script was not used due to system constraints at the Wisconsin site, his effort was greatly appreciated and was very helpful in the later developments.
The Wisconsin site was running a VAX/VMS system. Due to the strong security protection, it was difficult to implement some automatic web CGI features as an ordinary user, for example, the online processing of alumni information. Also, as the more people are surfing the net, the site became busy. At this time, Dr. YANG Qing at the University of Rhode Island (URI) offered to set up another site: http://www.ele.uri.edu/hust/. With the talant of both HU Yiming and Yang Qing, the new site was set up in May 1996, and this site looks more colorful and included automatic features that were lacking at the Wisconsin site. As a result, we made the new URI site our regular site and the Wisconsin the backup site in Mid-June, 1996.
A second backup site, the Boys Town site, was added in March 1997. This site is purely experimental and for fun. On this site, Dr. Cai tests all the online, real-time prcessing functions and learn to set up a web server and other system managements. The machine was an office PC, a Pentium 133 running linux (a free unix). As Dr. Cai has to do some work with the PC under DOS/Windows to make a living, this site may be closed daytime weekdays. However, it was running about 70% of daytime weekdays in the last two months. While it is unlikely for the machine to be shutdown when you are in the middle of something, if that do occur, please accept this apology in advance.
The alumni information at different site were updated weekly (regular site) or biweekly (backup sites). So it may take upto two weeks for your information to be updated on all sites.
It you would like to setup a mirror/backup site, please contact us. We'll offer technical help as much as we can.