by Art Tantillo
The Internet and Web
If you are any kind of an information junkie like me, I am sure that you want access to the Internet and the Web. Paul Oman wrote of the Internet and Web: “The internet is the Wild Frontier. It may be the most dramatic human leap forward in your lifetime . Pioneers are welcome; all others have the option of waiting ...” I couldn’t wait.
The Computer
I write this article to encourage those of you that have a memory challenged XT, AT, 386, or 486 computer with a skinny hard drive to join the Internet and World Wide Web fun and exploration. We’re talking about those old dinosaurs that don’t have 16 meg of RAM and 2 gigabyte hard drives like today’s fat cat computers have. If you are reading this article you are most likely one of the 17,000 Hal -PC members and have a computer with a modem. Hopefully at least a 14.4k bps modem. So it’s slow. It’s a lot faster than you can read and slow enough so that you can watch it execute commands. You got what it takes to get on the Internet and the World Wid e Web with a HALNet shell account. Is there a catch? Is it worth the cost? Read on and see what you decide.
The Shell Account?
My solution to getting on the Internet in 1994 with my old XT computer, that had 539K of available RAM and about 4 meg of disk space left, was to get a HALNet UNIX shell account. All the memory hungry and disk hungry programs that I needed to navigate th e Internet would live on HALNet’s UNIX computer.
Getting Started
I soon discovered that the World Wide Web was where I wanted to spend most of my Internet time. I had to learn some UNIX shell commands and Lynx browser commands. I have found the learning not only rewarding but mostly fun. I hate steep learning curves. I believe in the KISS philosophy (Keep It Simple Stupid). Not having Windows and Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer etc. to configure for Internet access keeps it simple for me. I don’t think I would have enjoyed learning about UNIX if it were not for a book about UNIX. The book I chose was “The Unix Companion” by Harley Hahn. “The New Internet Navigator” by Paul Glister saved me much grief learning about the Internet. Before I got the books I spent many hours capturing and printing out help files, FAQs and UNIX manual pages before I realized that I needed books that were written in simple English and no t what seemed like source code.
The Lynx Browser
The most interesting thing I do with my Internet connection is World Wide Web browsing with the Lynx Web browser. Even though every Web site I have visited states that it is optimized for Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer browsers, I have few probl ems navigating or viewing the text. However, life with Lynx has some frustrations. No pretty on -line pictures when browsing Web pages. (A plus for parents who worry about their children viewing dirty pictures.) Only text. (There is dirty text however.) No point and click on long site names. And without warning you can be visited by the alien invade rs. (Garbage characters that invade your screen.) One of the first commands to learn is how to refresh your screen for whatever UNIX program you are in, to get rid of garbage. There are some sites that use frames, and don’t offer a text only alternative, that the Lynx browser won’t be able to view.
There’s More
Even though my emphasis is on World Wide Web browsing with Lynx, a HALNet shell account offers much more for Internet exploration and activity. I find it very easy to do e-mail with the PINE mail program. The Tin program is easy to learn and does a good job searching, reading and saving news group messages. I haven’t even begun to use IRC, gopher, and telnet yet. All these programs and more help and support than you could ever want come to you with your HALNet account.
A HALNet shell account and Lynx are powerful tools for anyone accessing the Web with a system that cannot handle multimedia capabilities, such as graphics and sound. Lynx has been refined over time to become an easy to use browser, and in some cases Lynx can actually be more efficient than other Web clients. If you want to use the Web for access to documents that do not rely on graphics, or indeed to download documents from FTP sites, you have little need for multimedia. In fact, for that type of access requirement, graphics and other additions can actually be distractions. A HALNet shell account with the Lynx browser is well worth considering for specific kinds of access, or simply to find out if the Internet and World Wide Web is of any interest to y ou. There are a reported 13,000 of us HAL-PC members and a little over 6,000 of us access the Internet via HALNet. Hopefully that’s not only because we don’t know about HALNet shell account access. Come aboard.
Art Tantillo is a HAL-PC member who can be contacted at arttan@hal-pc.org
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.