3D File System Navigator for IRIX 4.0.1+

As seen in "Jurassic Park"!

fsn (pronounced fusion) is a file system navigator in cyberspace. It lays out the directories in a hierarchy with each directory represented by a pedestal. The height of the pedestal is proportional to the size of the files in the directory. The directories are connected by wires, on which it is possible to travel. On top of each directory are boxes representing individual files. The height of the box represents the size of the file, while the color represents the age.

Fsn is intended as an investigation in information landscape navigation. Although the file system was chosen as a system to navigate through, similar paradigms could be applied to other trees and graphs, such as call graphs.

Keep in mind that fsn is a prototype and an experiment. It is neither a full featured product nor a replacement for a filesystem manager such as Workspace.

Note: FSN only works on IRIX versions 5.3 and below.

Fsn is available via anonymous ftp from our ftp server ftp.sgi.com in the directory ~ftp/sgi/fsn. There are 2 files in this directory:

-r--r--r-- 1 root 0 4718 Apr 8 1992 README
-r--r--r-- 1 root 0 304484 Mar 27 1992 fsn.tar.Z

fsn.tar.Z is a compressed tar file containing all the files needed to install and run fsn. README contains instructions for uncompressing, installing, and running fsn.

To obtain fsn via anonymous ftp, use user name "anonymous" and your email address as a password:

%ftp ftp.sgi.com
Enter user name: anonymous
Password: me@myhost.edu
ftp> cd sgi/fsn
ftp> get README
ftp> get fsn.tar.Z
ftp> quit