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Slip on board with Box kit

Arman Danesh

AS the Internet has gained rapidly in popularity, the user base has begun to move from a group of tech-heads in the bowels of university campuses to people who may be plugging a modem into their PC for the first time.

While the former may think of Windows as panes of glass they see on the rare occasions they look up from their UNIX prompts, for most people the traditional UNIX command-line interface of the Internet is frightening, foreign and almost forbidden.

Enter SLIP and PPP. These wonderful protocols have allowed the development of a whole suite of Windows-based applications which run on PCs, providing a point-and-click front end to most major parts of the Internet, including mail, gopher, the World Wide Web, FTP and Usenet newsgroups.

Unfortunately, having grown out of the tech-head culture of the Internet, the early tools available for most Windows users to take advantage of these lovely applications were shareware SLIP and PPP dialers, the most widely-used being the Trumpet Winsock package.

There is nothing wrong with it, but for complete novices it may have required a bit too much computer and Internet know-how to get up and running.

Once configured, though, the applications which ran on top of it were generally easy enough to be used by anyone comfortable with the basic Windows interface.

Still, for the complete novice, even this may be too much to ask.

The result has been a flood of commercial Internet connectivity packages which are designed to combine an easy-to-configure SLIP or PPP package with a suite of commercial, supported applications for all the major Internet utilities such as mail and gopher.

Internet in a Box was arguably the first such package to hit the market.

It brings together a SLIP/PPP dialer with the AIR series of Internet applications, which include a mail reader, news browser, FTP package, gopher client and, of course a Web browser.

While configuring the system is far easier than with Trumpet, it still requires at least a minimal knowledge of SLIP or PPP so the user can collect and provide the data needed by the configuration program, including IP address, domain name and so on.

The installation manual does help guide readers through this process, but the need to provide such information indicates that even newer protocols such as PPP are still a long way from self-configuring.

Still, the configuration process is not too difficult, and the manual does provide clear instructions so someone without experience setting up a SLIP connection will be able to talk to their service provider and get the right information.

Once configured, users can double-click on any of the Internet applications and this will launch the dialer, which guides the user through logging into their provider's system.

When logged in, the application launches.

The AIR series of applications provide a strong set of utilities with very little missing.

The mail program interacts with both POP3 and SMTP mail servers and allows for off-line mail composition and reading. Unfortunately, the Air Mail client did not work quite as the manual outlined.

I ended up sucking more than 200 mailboxes from my mailbox on the Internet into my local mailbox on my PC making it almost impossible to put them back in my Internet directory. The manual had said the mail would stay on the host until I decided to bring them to the local PC.

Still, most users are unlikely to have this many messages to start with and this should not pose a major problem.

The gopher client is straightforward enough, providing a point-and-click interface using folder and file icons reminiscent of Windows' File Manager.

The news reader also uses a similar interface, which is quite easy to learn.

But, like all Windows-based SLIP newsreaders, using the AIR newsreader is slower than using a program like Tin at a real command-line UNIX session because to open a newsgroup means the AIR program needs to download all the messages in the group.

And across an average 14.4Kbps modem connection, a newsgroup with several hundred messages can take a while to open.

The FTP program is, perhaps, the best designed utility in the package.

It interacts with File Manager, essentially acting as an extension to it.

When the FTP client is launched, users are faced with the File Manager plus an extra Window showing the remote directory on the Internet.

Users can then drag files between File Manager and the remote directory just as they do between drives making it simple to learn to use FTP.

As with any Internet connectivity package, though, a major test lies in its Web browser.

AIR Mosaic is an enhanced version of the original free Mosaic which launched the World Wide Web revolution.

It supports extras such as transparent GIF images and helps speed up display times by loading text before it loads images. But, unlike Netscape, it does not display in-line images as they load and it does not multiplex the connection to load several images in parallel, opting to load each image sequentially instead.

Still, AIR Mosaic is fast and appears quite stable compared to earlier Mosaic browsers which were known to crash frequently.

Less stable though were the AIR news and mail clients, both of which crashed twice in a single session. Granted, they did not not crash Windows when they failed and they did not even manage to disturb the actual connection to the Internet, which testifies to the stability of the underlying connection protocol software.

One of the most compelling reasons to buy Internet in a Box, though, has to be the fact that it includes a free copy of Ed Krol's The Whole Internet User's Guide, which for some time was the Bible of Internet guidebooks.

Even with its few flaws, Internet in a Box is an attractive option for the novice Internet user who wants to take advantage of SLIP or PPP access. It is available for $899 from KPS Video Express.

Users who buy a copy before June 1 will receive a voucher worth $350 against the connection and first month charges for a new account on HK SuperNet.

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