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UP AND RUNNING ON THE NET IN 1 DAY (Well Almost....)
by John N. Stewart
My first Internet experience was on a small BBS in the San Fernando Valley here in Southern California. It was all text and pretty cryptic and bland and I recall being impressed with the vast size of it all. As an artist and illustrator I was intrigued by the possibilities of making your work visible to the entire world instantly. Also visiting the Prado, Louvre, and Smithsonian within a 15 minute slice of time. I had no idea of what a URL, HTML document or what these < <> > things were. After reading some of the endless articles dealing with the WEB in Byte, PC, and a myriad of other magazines I slowly began my WWW education. Then America on Line included (trumpets like Ben Hur) Internet Access and I ventured out cautiously stepping from URL to URL not wanting to fall into Great Internet Void. After a while I was bouncing around like a pachinko ball with hours whizzing by like minutes and enjoying every moment of it. Then I got my AOL bill and noticed that it had suddenly tripled. My wife quickly made me aware of this with all of the subtlety of a rubber mallet. I think that wives view the Internet and computers in general as the "other" woman.
Undaunted, I began looking around for better ways to get on the Net. I was looking in an issue of Micro-Times and an ad popped out at me. It said: "UNLIMITED HOURS ON THE NET $12 per month!!!" I called immediately and there was a deafening screeching avalanche of bits of information bombarding my ear drums. Being of average intelligence I quickly realized that this was not a human voice. Then I saw printed next to the phone number in small letters: sign in as guest. I brought up terminal in Windows and re-dialed the number and signed in as guest. The connection broke - I tried again - three times. Breaking through I was treated to a large paragraph of what this "shall be nameless" service offered. I was then asked if I would like to join and with total abandon, I did. I was then told that I needed to download several programs (there was a list of 20 or so). I had no clue of what to download and there were no descriptions of what the heck they were.
Second thoughts. Remembering I had just given them my Bank-1 Visa numbers and expiration date. Remembered seeing another phone number in the "large paragraph". Couldn't get back. Re-logged but couldn't get back to "large paragraph". Several tries later found "large paragraph". (I Recall feeling like Clarke after finding Livingston.) I found the number and talked to a real person, a very nice young lady who told me that I needed to download a Trumpet Windsock, a Eudora and a Netscape and then I would be in business. So I did. I remembered having seen a windsock at the airport across the street from our house in Glendale, as a kid but that was about all I knew about it. I was sure that a Eudora was a medieval type of musical instrument and a Netscape was a painting of Fisherman's Wharf. (sorry about that one, but I am an artist)
What they don't tell you is that each of these programs is Share-ware and if you don't register them, for a small fee, could possibly self-destruct in 30 days. They also required configurations en masse, which I must relate, they were willing to fax or mail to you. If you go this route be ready for lots of tech-support calls. During this trial I had been working at Walt Disney Imagineering, "The Happiest Place on Earth" and wasn't able to spend a lot of time during the day talking to teckies. After several un-returned phone calls, unfulfilled promises and wrong information I decided to cancel already.
I saw another ad in Micro-Times: "Unlimited Time on the Net - $19.95 per month - with 5 megabytes of your own Web Pages thrown in." "Call ____world at xxx-xxxxx now". I called. I signed. I conquered. They sent me a disk, I installed it. I looked at the Windows Icons (there were 6 or so) I saw the vaguely familiar names: Trumpet Windsock, Eudora, FTP, Netscape, and a couple others and I shuddered. I called and they walked me through what I needed and to my surprise everything worked. I WAS ON THE INTERNET! (double twisting back flip).
It was the Christmas Season and visions of URL pages raced through my head. I had 5 megabytes of Internet Real Estate to play with. What now? I started looking at URLs. Big ones, small ones, creative ones, boring ones. I noticed that Netscape had a sub-directory called CACHE and with X-Tree for Windows I started viewing these strangely named files (like: mOod4a1j.htm) and discovered that these were HTML pages, written in HTML language. Having written a lot of programs in Basic and Qbasic I wasn't adverse to learning a new language, but I wanted to learn it today!
Through Yahoo's search engine (http://www.yahoo.com)I looked up HTML and struck gold. I found a great URL at this address: (http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu:80/HyperNews/get/www/html/lang.html). Don't you love Internet addresses? Why couldn't it be GO HTM? At any rate it turned out to be a wonderful site containing simple to complex HTML articles at many levels with descriptions and tutorials. What more could you want? Being particularly lazy that day I decided to steal a URL. I put on black pants, a black sweat shirt and black stocking cap and started casing URL's. (I decided not to stretch the nylons over the head this time.) I found several really great looking URLs walked over roof-tops to X-TREE (feeling like Cary Grant)logged C:\Netscape\CACHE and took a peek. It was all there - I recognized the names, places, descriptions - it was too good to be true. I started playing around with substituting their title with my title. What if I do this or that or the other thing? Then something happened...in the middle of my theft I started to get interested in HTML, went back to the magic HTML site (there are many, by the way) and started printing out pages. After a couple of evenings of this I had accumulated about 50 or so pages of text.
INSTANT HTML (LITE): Use a text editor like Notepad. You use Tags. Tags are inside
of <these guys>. Tags usually work in pairs. One before what you want to do and one after. The
last tag command has a / in front of it like:</a>. <html> is always the first tag at the top of the
page. </html> is the last thing on the page. <title> put your title here </title> This title appears at the very top of the Netscape window. Next is your Headline:
* under construction...
This might be a good spot to insert the text file for my home page - it will give you an idea of
how to link other pages and URLS from your text. You can view the output by copying it to a file, saving it to SAMPLE.HTM or for Mac users MCSAMPLE.HTML and then loading it into your browser. Or just look at it at http://www.westworld.com/~jonart
5, 4, 3, 2, 1......
<html>
<TITLE>THE ART OF JOHN N. STEWART</TITLE>
<body background="back1.gif">
<HTML><hr size=20>
<center><br>
<A href="jns.html"><img border=0 ALT = "The Art of John N.
Stewart"src="taojns1.jpg" >
<BR><hr>
<img align=absmiddle border=0 src="ntvty.jpg"
></a><br><hr><br>
<menu><font size=5>
<li><a href="paintgr.html"> painting (realism)</a>
<li><a href="paintga.html"> painting (abstract)</a>
<li><a href="drawg.html"> drawings </a>
<li><a href="portrait.html"> portraits</a>
<li><a href="sculpt.html">sculpture</a>
<li><a href="murals.html">murals</a>
<li><a href="filmart.html">art for film</a>
<li><a href="illus.html">illustration</a>
<li><a href="compart.html"> computer art</a>
<li><a href="lume.html"> luminarium</a>
<li><a href="bio.html">biographies</a>
<li><a href="plist.html">feedback </a>
<li><a href="links.html">favorite links </a>
</menu><br>
<img src="rbstrip.jpg">
<br><hr><br><i><font size=3><strong>[as you go through
the pages...clicking on smaller images will create larger
ones]</strong></i><p><p>
* under construction...
<BR><hr><BR>
<font size=4><i>(all images (c)1995 by john n. stewart, all rights and usage
reserved.)<i><br>
<hr><a href="sas.html">This URL designed by SAS</a>
</center>
<img src="vastiny.jpg" ><br>
<font size=4>remember this symbol - It will always get you back to the main
menu....<p>
<hr size=12>
</html>
</pre>
The following is what the output looks like:
[as you go through the pages...clicking on smaller images will create larger ones]
(all images (c)1995 by john n. stewart, all rights and usage reserved.)
This URL designed by SAS
