
 A Trip to all Points...Everywhere!

                      What Will You Do On the Internet?
                       Copyright 1995 by Kyle Freeman

 It is a given that you've got to be connected to the Internet!  After all
 the advertising you've seen calculated to make you feel like a troglo-
 dyte just 'cause you aren't wired for the global party everyone else is
 having, you have to sign up  You must, if for no other reason than to keep
 your self-respect.  Once you're a proud member of the brother-hood of hip
 souls who know where the action in the 21st century is going to be, what
 will you actually do on the Internet? Well, perhaps not as much as first
 imagined.  Here's an account, for what it's worth, of what I do on the
 Net.  I don't pretend to think my experience is typical because I don't
 think there is such a thing as a typical user. But I suspect the shape of
 my experience is common to many and may well preshadow your own.

 First of all, unless you're reasonably lucky, you're more than likely
 going to struggle with setting up your connection.  You have to worry
 about things like a TCP/IP stack, and winsock, and trumpet, and IP
 addresses, most of which will be completely new to you, even if you're an
 experienced computer user.  Unless you get very good step-by-step
 instructions with your software, or as is more and more likely these days,
 your Internet provider sends you software already configured with its
 address, your ardor to get on the Net straightaway will run into that
 sphinx you've met elsewhere too many times in Computer Land that simply
 won't let you get past a certain sticking point until you answer what
 seems to you like riddles.  If you want to understand all this stuff, by
 the way, you can read an excellent article in WindoWatch Vol.1 No.2 by
 Harry Kriz.  But then again you may be lucky enough to get past this step
 without any trouble.

 When you finally get everything right, your new found fervor to get on
 with it, may be thwarted if you first set up your software under
 Windows3.1 and then upgraded to Win95.  Some Internet providers, The Well
 is one, send you software that works fine in Windows3.1 but suddenly won't
 work at all under Win95.  They have workarounds, but again it's something
 you'd never figure out by yourself without the multipage set of
 instructions they'll send you after you've pulled out most of your hair
 and called them for help.  So before you sign up, ask if the provider's
 software runs under Win95.  By now,  providers are aware of the need to
 make their software compatible with Win95, so this particular hassle
 should soon, like old soldiers, just fade away.  But save yourself some
 prolonged grief by checking to be sure.

 I first got on the Internet with NetCom's NetCruiser, which I still use as
 my basic connection.  NetCom provides all the basic Internet services in
 workable, though not state of the art, applets.  It's easy to set up and
 requires no fiddling for Win95.  The first thing I wanted to do was
 explore the World Wide Web.  There are of course a zillion places to visit
 on the Web, but its very size makes it as exhausting as spending a day in
 the Louvre.  And not every site is a masterpiece, either.  I found that
 just touring around by following hypertext links can waste whole weeks of
 your time.

 I went first to the White House home page (www.whitehouse.gov) to see lots
 of pictures of its various rooms, a full account of President Clinton's
 inauguration, sounds of the bells that rang across the country on that
 night, as well as the sound of Sox the Cat's meow. You can leave a message
 for the President, too, if you're so minded. My brother wrote a note
 commending Bill on something or other and received a letter of thanks
 signed by the President's very own signature machine.  Of course if you
 think of the President as Slick Willie, the nation's chief villain, you
 can write that, too.  You'll also get a letter in response: from the IRS.
 Just kidding; Nixon's dead.

 There are all sorts of places you'll want to visit before the novelty of
 the thing wears off.  You can see a map of the Paris subway, enter a
 starting and a destination point, and be advised on the best route to
 take.  (http://wings.buffalo.edu)  I believe it is from that same site
 that you can view and download images of Paris, from the Eiffel Tower, of
 course, to moody scenes along the Seine, to L'Arc de Triomphe, and all
 sorts of street scenes.  If you've ever been to Paris and loved the place,
 you might want some reminders of it on your desktop.

 While still on the Web, let me mention two other sites that might interest
 someone who cares about art.  At www.christusrex.org you can get a
 complete set of all the art in the Sistine Chapel.  Not only can you get
 the Michelangelo ceiling panels, in groups and individual paintings, you
 can retrieve the Last Judgment on the back wall and all the tapestries on
 the side walls done by other artists. You can download more than three
 hundred images, with thumb nail sketches of each one so that you know what
 you're getting before you spend a lot of time downloading the wrong
 picture.

 You can also visit the Louvre, where you can download JPEG images of much
 of its art. There are several ways to get there: http://sunsite.unc.edu/
 is one; http://mistral.enst.fr and http://www.emf.net are two more.  I
 don't know what use it serves to have a Botticelli painting in your
 computer, but I like having La Primavera in mine.  If you ask do I really
 need such things, I'd say "No, of course not." But I'd also agree with the
 sentiments of King Lear: "Allow not nature more than nature needs, Man's
 life is cheap as beast's."  So if you can find a use, the paintings are
 there just waiting to visit - a screen near you.

 Last, many of you may know the work of the Limbourg Brothers, who painted
 a series of calendar illustra-tions in the 14th century known as Les Tres
 Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. The image to the left is January. These can
 also be found on the home page of the WebMuseum, along with the scenes of
 Paris I mentioned above.  They would make classy cover pages for
 news-letters that use calendars or great pictures to decorate notices of
 parties.

 After spending lots of time pursuing such butterflies, I now use the Web
 only for specific tasks, mostly to get software upgrades from
 manufacturers' sites.  Being a tourist, either in foreign locales or on
 your computer screen, finally gets tiring and even boring.  I predict
 that, like me, you'll find you'll use the World Wide Web only when you
 have a specific purpose. Long before I got on the Internet, I used to
 monitor an Internet Usenet group from my local BBS, which carried a select
 number of such groups.  This group, comp.archives.msdos.announce, lists
 all the shareware uploaded to two of the biggest shareware depositories,
 SimTel, which used to be part of the defense department, and Garbo, a site
 at the University of Wasa in Finland.  Once on the Net, it's possible to
 use ftp to retrieve files from these sites.  SimTel is at ftp.coast.net
 but has many other mirror sites around the world, and garbo can be found
 at garbo.uwasa.fi.  Each has scores of directories of shareware files of
 all sorts, including, at least at SimTel, many Windows programs.  SimTel,
 by the way, has a whole directory devoted to WindoWatch, where you can
 download all the back issues, the essential Acrobat viewer to read them,
 and a zipped file (calend12.zip) with all twelve of the calendar
 illustrations....much to large to publish here. Each site has an index
 file to help you can find what's available in their archives. Getting
 files is quicker using ftp than the Web simply because you don't have to
 wait for all the graphics to load on a home page.

 If you're new to modeming, the chances are good that you'll be struck with
 Downloading Fever once you see all these programs and images you can get
 with a few keystrokes.  Even if you're a BBS veteran and have already
 shaken off that delirium of grabbing every nifty looking program in sight,
 you may still fall prey to it for a while once you have a whole new quarry
 in view.  But still, every fever runs its course, and once you've glutted
 your hard drive with more goodies than a greedy child on Halloween, you'll
 find, like I did, that you'll seldom spend much time downloading files,
 and then only when it's an important file you've read about somewhere
 else.  I now spend my ftp time at either Microsoft's ftp site
 (ftp.microsoft.com), getting McAfee's latest virus scanning programs
 (ftp.mcafee.com), or getting program updates, such as Colorado's latest
 free upgrade for its Windows 95 tape backup program (ftp.hp.com). Another
 Internet tool you'll get from a full provider is Telnet, which lets you
 operate other computers as if you're in front of them.  I amused myself
 with looking at the card catalogues of the Library of Congress and the
 Harvard On Line Library Services looking for specific books. Unless you
 really need to know what's been published, or expect to take a trip to
 either place to look at a rare book, chances are you won't use it much
 either.  I know there are many other places that have Telnet sites, but
 have limited needs so rarely ever use them.

 Of course the most popular feature on the Internet is e-mail.  You can
 send messages across the country or the world, knowing they'll arrive in
 seconds.  It may well be the thing you use most on the Internet.  Of
 course even the joys of e-mail have been hyped to some degree.  Your
 friends in Paris won't get your messages right away unless they dial up
 their provider within a few minutes of time from when you send it.  You
 won't get theirs, either, without doing the same.  Many BBSes provide
 Internet e-mail far less expensively than the $20 a month you're likely to
 pay for your access.  Still, it's certainly quicker than letters, easier
 than writing something on paper or trundling it off to the mail box.

 Last, I suppose I should mention what may motivate some to get on the Net.
 You no doubt saw news stories about hearings in the Senate about all the
 pornography infesting the Internet.  To hear them talk you would think you
 couldn't spend ten minutes online without being exposed to scenes of
 unimaginable depravity.  Of course there are such scenes, but you really
 have to go looking for them to see anything remotely deviant.  And if you
 do spend the time to download any of the stuff, what you end up with are
 pictures you see on a computer screen,  not nearly as clear as photographs
 or video tapes, which is where most of them were scanned to start with.
 Like everything else on the Internet, it sounds more titillating to hear
 Senator Helms rail against bestiality and lesbian nuns or whatever, than
 to actually see the often grainy images uploaded by some over active
 teenager.

 You've had to notice a theme running through this account. You'll be
 excited when you first log on to this vast new venture, and you should be.
 It's undeniably exciting to reach across the world to hear the President
 greet you at your desktop, to send messages thousands of miles in
 milliseconds, or to meet people with similar interests.  But like all
 novelties, the excitement wears off.  You'll spend less time online, but
 you'll be equipped to do far more things much more quickly than you ever
 did them before.  You'll become one of the citizens of cyber-space,
 cruising down the Information Superhighway.  After a few joy rides, your
 modem will stay in the garage most of the time.  But like your car, your
 modem will be a vehicle for freedom, ready to trans-port you across the
 world at a second's notice.  You'll make friends, find jobs, get news,
 play games, and of course, feed your computer all the software it demands.
 It will become another of those life-changing technologies that change
 your life, like radio, telephone, TV, automo-biles and jet travel once
 did.  And like them you'll come to take it for granted as a fact of life.


 Kyle Freeman is a regular contributor to WindoWatch. A former teacher, he
 now practices his computer craft in San Francisco as a consultant. I asked
 him to take us on a tour of the Internet and this visual feast is the
 result.






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