How do I access iCal from another non-Mac computer?

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

What do you mean by 'access' them?

A published calendar can by displayed as a read-only document in a web browser by entering a URL crafted like this:

http://ical.mac.com/<shortusername>/<calendarname>

If your Mac OS X user account shortusername is 'dbuether' and the calendar you want to access is 'personal' for example, the URL you would use is this:

http://ical.mac.com/dbuether/personal

Anyone who knows your shortusername and the names of one or more of your published calendars can view them.

If you want to synchronize your calendars, you can use either .Mac Sync with a .Mac account to synchronize them through .Mac across multiple computers, or you can use MySync in a client-server configuration without a .Mac account:

http://www.mildmanneredindustries.com/mysync

iCal 3 and Teams, along with iCal Server—coming the the Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard release in about six months—will allow you to publish editable, password protected calendars.

There are half-step hacks (half-assed is a better description, actually) or workarounds, but realistically and reliably, you cannot edit an iCal calendar from a Windows-based platform.

But, iCal and iCal server are based upon the emerging CalDAV standard, and several technology players (Apple, Novell and Oracle, for example) along with a number of major universities, are members of the standards group pushing for web enabled, cross platform calendar synchronization, sharing and editing. Microsoft seems not to be involved, but may be actively pursuing compatible technology for Windows Vista or later releases. See these links:

http://www.calconnect.org/

http://ietf.osafoundation.org/caldav/index.html

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/calendarserver