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WONCA RURAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY EXCHANGE (W.R.I.T.E.)
Surfing the Net with a Doorstop!
Suffering from major under-funding for computer support? Dealing with hand-me-down machines from charities and old surplus stock from government? Feeling that the Internet is passing you by? Well, read on…all is not lost. You can use that cantankerous old machine that you thought was only useful as a doorstop.
So what’s the secret? How can you possibly use that old clunker, when you hear that the current state of the art hardware recommendations are three orders of magnitude faster, bigger and more expensive than what you have available?
Avoid the pretty pictures! While the graphical user interface, usually Microsoft Windows, has made it much easier to surf the net and find what you want, it has also raised the bar considerably in terms of hardware requirements. Windows 95 and onwards will not run at all on an 80286 processor and is positively glacial on even the fastest 80386.
But if you stick to the ugly old character mode interface, that is 25 lines of 80 characters each, which was typical of old DOS applications, then you can still do a lot of useful stuff on the Internet. It sure don't look as pretty and can be a little bit more tricky for beginners to learn but it will still get the job done for a lot of everyday stuff. Remember that the Internet was thriving nicely and providing loads of useful information, long before Windows and Netscape came along.
Minimum Requirements
So what's the least you can get away with for hardware? Well, when it really comes down to it, anything that will run DOS will do at a pinch. (I'm afraid I'm painfully ignorant of the Apple world but the principles are largely the same.) If you stick to older DOS applications then you don't need a fast processor, lots of RAM or much in the way of hard disk space.
The item that will have the greatest effect on your ability to do much communicating will be the modem. It is now pretty easy to find old discarded 9600bps and 14400bps modems kicking around. Try to find a 14400bps modem because they pretty much all talk to each other using a protocol called v.32 - some of the older 9600bps modems used proprietary protocols which means that you have to have the same type of modem on each end of the line, which is usually not practical. If you are really stuck, you could even drop down to a 2400bps modem - it won't be much use for anything other than simple email but that is still better than nothing. The good news is that all 2400bps modems talk to all other modems quite happily.
If you are using a modem that runs at 9600bps or better then try to pair it with a computer that has at least a 16MHz 80286. Any slower than this and the processor will not be able to keep up with the bit flow from the modem. RAM space and disk space are not really that important at all.
The other important step is to find a connection that allows direct access to the Internet. Many Internet Service Providers now limit users to using Windows type interfaces. But older government and university networks often will support non-graphical access. You should find that the older, more experienced tech support people that work with these organizations will understand such terms as 'direct telnet access'.
Software
So, if you can't use Windows, how do you communicate with the Internet? Well, as I said, remember that the Internet predates Windows by a long way. All you really need is a simple but decent communications program - I would recommend that you try and find a copy of ProComm 2.4.2 - this was a shareware DOS application that worked very well for this kind of stuff. But any communications program that will allow you to
- control the modem
- use VT-100 terminal emulation
will do pretty well.
This last term could do with a little bit of explaining. Back in the old days of mainframe computers, all users accessed them through dumb terminals. These terminals did no real computing but simply sent keystrokes to the mainframe and received characters on the screen. One of the most ubiquitous types of terminals around in those days was called a DEC VT-100.
A terminal emulation program makes the computer at the other end think that your computer, whatever it actually is, is a plain old dumb terminal. Mainframe computers know how to deal with dumb terminals and are quite happy doing all the real work. So if your computer behaves as if it is a plain old dumb VT-100 terminal, it will be able to speak to a very wide range of machines around the world.
The other benefit of pretending to be a plain old dumb terminal is that the mainframe at the other end makes available to you a number of useful programs to get some actual work done. You don't actually need a copy of these programs, since you are executing them remotely on the machine at the other end of the connection. Sounds odd but it works quite well.
So what can you do on the Internet?
With your computer and software acting as a plain old dumb terminal, you can actually achieve quite a lot of useful stuff. Typically you would be able to do the following:
Telnet
You typically use the telnet command to log into the remote network. Remember that many of these systems are running Unix so case matters in commands ( Telnet or telNet will not work). You will need a userid and password, just as you would for most other types of Internet access. You may also need to know the exact machine name at the other end. The tech support people should be able to tell you this.
E-mail
The bulk of email can be done just fine using a simple character based interface. You will not be able to send fancy formatted letterheads but how often do you do that with email anyway? The two most popular programs are pine and elm - the interface is a bit clunky but is very efficient once you get used to it. These programs are actually stored on the mainframe at the other end. Simply type in pine or elm, once you have logged onto the network using telnet.
Web browsing
Yes, believe it or not, you can actually do some limited web surfing with plain old DOS.
There are two ways of doing this. Now you won't see all the pretty pictures etc that are now typical of web pages straight away, but you can still get a surprising amount of useful information from the text of these sites. Many sites still offer a text only version so look for this on the opening page of a site. The first program that you can run, once you have logged in with telnet, is lynx. It will handle hyperlinks quite happily and will even allow you to download graphics and sound files etc - you just can't see them or hear them without using some other chicanery.
The second option is to use a program called Arachne (from http://home.arachne.cz/), which allows standard PPP or SLIP access to the Internet from an old 286 or 386 computer. It will show the location of pictures and allow viewing them on mouse click.
Literature searching
If your University provides the service, it is possible to do quite complex literature searching, using a purely character based interface. In fact, many library terminals won't allow anything else. Well, you can often access this same software remotely using telnet. Ovid provides a good character based interface to Medline. Ask your tech support people about access to this. You will often need a second userid and password to get access to a service like this.
File transfers
Long before Netscape and Windows, people were transferring many files around the Internet. They did this using the File Transfer Protocol or ftp. Once again, you simply run the ftp program on the remote computer so you don't need any additional software on your machine to do this. Many ftp sites will allow open access to any user. Simply login with the userid of anonymous and use your email address as the password. This is common practice - you're not cheating. One quirk about ftp - the commands sometimes seem a bit backward and quirky. But if you remember that you are actually running the program remotely on the other machine, then the commands make a bit more sense. Rather than go into all the arcane commands here, you will do better if you get a hold of a copy of The Internet for Dummies (IDG Books), where this is explained very well.
Other applications
You can actually do many of the other things that fancy web surfers do, with plain old character based software. You can find people's email addresses using finger; you can cruise the newsgroups with rn (Unix speak for 'read news'); you can check the time with a super accurate time server; you can participate in Internet Relay Chat groups.
So don't throw away that old doorstop of a machine - it's probably more useful than you thought!
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