Splashing the Web

January 1996

These last few epistles that I have been allowed to write by ComputorLink's publisher have been easy to dash off, because most of the stuff I have been talking about is related to what I do professionally all day long at World Wide Widgets. However, the theme of this month's magazine is The Internet. And for most people today, that means The Web. And, Denbabe don't know diddly about surfing, either in its wet form or the with the binary version.

So I thought I would write a piece about how I got into Webness, and what it took to get there, and what I found when I got there. It turns out that at this same time, I finally decided to byte the Windows 95 bullet and convert from Windows 3.11. I picked up both the W95 upgrade kit, and the W95 Plus Pack, which all the snobby magazines say not to buy because it is all rip off, but which I found to have a lot of neat stuff in it. (The neatest was: full object dragging, rather than the wimpy outline dragging that normal Windows stiffs you with).

Now, I am not an Internet Newby completely. I have had a personal Internet account for a couple of years, but dial up access only, which means that I have had access to E-mail, newsgroups, and some funny comic book things called Archie and Veronica. The Web, aka a PPP account (that stands for Point to Point Protocol, but who cares?) was too pricy up until the recent Spokane Business and Computer Expo. I guess all umteen Inet providers in Spokane sort of gulped when they all got together in the same building, and when some of them hung out their price shingles, my beloved provider totally freaked and made their Web access competitive.

You need three things to be a Webnaught. First, a computer with a modem, probably something that most people reading this rag already have. Second, an Inet provider. And Third, some sort of browser software.

There are several access paths to the Inet. There are the USA wide providers like CompuServe or America Online. Or you can sneak on through your employer or college, or even the Public Library (if you live in the City). Or you can sign up with one of the many Inet providers in Spokane, many of which have ads and business cards right here in ComputorLink by no coincidence. The street price for a local Web provider is now in the $12 - $20 range, per month.

For my browser software, I decided to try the Internet Explorer that comes with the W95 Plus Pack. First of all, it was free, if you call $40 free. Second, I wanted to see if it could find something besides the Microsoft Network. You can get several other browsers, from Mosaic to Netscape (published by the most overly hyped company to hit wall street in the last year). Most of these things, for some reason that I do not understand, are free or almost so.

My Inet provider kindly sent me some instructions on how to set things up. Unfortunately, even though I told them I would be using the Explorer, they sent me instructions for the Dial Up Network program that comes with the Standard W95 installation. And the instructions for the Explorer are quite different. The hardest part of configuring this silly thing is that you need to know several IP addresses, which are long strings of meaningless numbers without which nothing works. Unfortunately, the funny numbers are different (by only one tiny digit, but Oh Well!) For the two different communication methods.

So, two days later, when my office Net Nerd clued me in to what I needed, I finally tried to connect to the Web. And, as I always find between 8PM and 10PM, the phone is always busy. Most communication programs that I have used will redial the phone number for you until it finds an available line. The Kids in Redmond apparently never had to deal with such a situation, so their software simply blats at you and tells you to go away and come back later when we can do something useful. Not real user friendly.

But, finally late at night, I was able to acquire a connection. And, not to my surprise, the first Home Page that I found was: The Microsoft Home Page. Home Pages are the first page that a Web service shows you. You gotta start someplace, and the Home Page is where you start on the Web. From the Home Page, you can bounce around (using hypertext jumps, which really means if you find a phrase in a different color than the rest of the text, chances are you can double click on it and jump to a different page in that Web provider's book). Generally there are many levels of these hypertext jumps, and therefore many pages of material to look at, and generally these pages will have jumps to other pages, which ...

These jumps are really more than just leafing through the pages one book, though, because some of these jumps actually bounce you to a completely different Web home page, on a completely different Web provider, in some other part of the country or even the world. And I personally find that really quite fascinating.

You are not stuck with the home page that you started off on, or just with the jumps that it provides you. If you know the name of some other home page, you can command your browser to head on over there directly. The bad news is, the names of these browsers are even more bizarre than are the funny numbers that make up IP addresses. Generally, they have a format like http://www.yuck.blat/~ding.dong, which if you parse it all out does have some eschatological meaning, but generally can simply be though of as an address that only a computer can love.

The first thing you want to find is a web searcher. The most famous of these is Yahoo, created by a couple of Stanford dropouts. Another is WebCrawler, and I think there is something called Spider (web). Anyway, these web sites contain data about other web sites, and give you a rather friendly way to find the real Home Pages that contain whatever it is that you are looking for.

In converting to W95, I found a problem with Procomm, my dial up software. I figured somebody on the Web must already have seen this problem, so I set the site address (a line on the top of the screen) to www.yahoo.com. (Of course, first you gotta know how to get there. Microsoft's home page was no help, but a recent newspaper clipping from the Spokesman-Review's real estate section of all things told me where to look for it.) I did a search for Procomm, and got only one hit, which was for some movie that somehow mentioned it. But Yahoo did suggest trying one of the other searchers, and I tried WebCrawler. I got there by clicking on a button in the Yahoo page. WebCrawler found 91 hits for Procomm, all equally as useless as the one that Yahoo found.

This points out one of the things that I have heard about the web: there is a lot of information out there, but there is a lot of trash also, and that seemed to be all that I was finding. So, I made a guess that Procomm would have a home page, probably named www.procomm.com, and what do you know, they did. And it had a section on technical support, and IT has a whole list of downloadable fixit files. None of which, unfortunately, could fix my problem, but at least the thought was there.

Procomm's home page suggested that if all these goodies were not enough, then please send some mail. And here is one of the weird problems with this whole Web Surfing. You still need all the old fashioned dialup stuff to do all the old fashioned things like send and receive mail, check out the news groups, and whatever. That was very disappointing. One should think that after one installs a really swift looking GUI interface to the Wide World, that E-mail would be a significant part of it all. As of now, two weeks into all this,I have not found it to be the case.

I talked to my office Net Nerd about this, and he assured me that it was not true, it was just I was using the Wrong Product!! As any Real Nerd knows, only Netscape is worth the electricity to blow it off the screen. And, since Netscape is free, he gave me a copy.

The installation of it went very smoothly, except that when it came up, nothing worked. And I mean nothing. Not Netscape. And now, not the Internet Explorer, either. (I had heard that installing W95 coldcocks Netscape, but I did not know about the quid pro quo). After a lot of fumbling around, I decided to go back to the original instructions that the Inet provider had given me about setting things up, and try them, since nothing rational seemed to work. And behold, after punching in still More long silly numbers, and clicking even more radio buttons in silly dialog boxes, Netscape finally came up. (And the Inet Explorer does too, now).

And, funny thing, the first thing you see is: Netscape's home page. This one is one Whole lot more useful than the Microsoft home page, since Netscape is an Inet company only, and Microsoft is involved in just about everything that uses or contains electrons. This page gives you instructions on how to use the web, search sites for finding stuff on the web, and even access to newsgroups, although not to E-mail.

Now for the bad news. Once you have found a set of favorite home pages, the Internet Explorer lets you keep a list of them, for very easy recall. Netscape seems to presume that you would never ever need another page but theirs, because they do Not have this admirable feature. And now that I have both the Explorer and Netscape on my computer, they seem to be in some sort of duel to the death. Whenever I now click on one of my "favorite pages" from the Explorer list, Netscape comes up and tries to shove the Explorer out of the way. That would be OK if it would only produce the desired page, but that does not happen either. You just get Browser Wars going on.

Because of issue deadlines and all the screwing around that it took to get just this far, that is about all that I can tell you about my Web experiences. By the time you and I read this column in ComputorLink in a couple of months, I will either be really comfortable with all this, and will laugh at what an idiot I was for having all these problems, or more likely, will have bagged the Web entirely, and will have gone back to my old tried and true character mode access to E-mail and the newsgroups. That is, if I can get my Procomm problem fixed.