Mosaic For The Masses

Browser software gives dial-up users equal access

By Lars Kongshem

Lars Kongshem is editorial assistant and webmaster of Electronic School.

Unless you've spent the past year on Mars, chances are you've heard a lot about Mosaic, a revolutionary piece of software that provides a graphical interface to the Internet. Widely touted as the Internet's "killer application," Mosaic brings user-friendliness to the global network of computer networks. In fact, Mosaic is poised to do for the Internet what the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows did for personal computers: popularize an empowering yet perplexing technology by making it easy to use.

It's been just two years since a small team of inspired undergraduates at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed and released the initial version of Mosaic into the public domain. The Internet hasn't been the same since. Mosaic's power to access and interact with multimedia documents that are "hyperlinked" on a global scale has caught the imagination of Internet users everywhere -- including educators and students -- who have been downloading free copies of the software at the rate of 1,600 per day.

Unfortunately, Mosaic has a catch -- namely, technical requirements that place it out of reach for all except an elite minority of today's Internet users. In fact, fewer than 5 percent of all Internet users worldwide can run Mosaic, according to rough industry estimates.

In the school field, the story is similar. Based on data collected by the Clearinghouse for Networked Information Discovery and Retrieval (CNIDR), Susan Calcari, of Internic Information Services, estimates that only from 2 to 4 percent of the nation's schools currently have the technical infrastructure to use Mosaic. By contrast, from 10 to 15 percent of K-12 teachers are believed to have non-Mosaic access to the Internet, Calcari writes in the September/October issue of NSF Network News.

What's the reason for this Infobahn roadblock? Simply put, not all Internet connections are created equal. The majority of Internet users -- including most schools and members of state education networks -- get their access indirectly. Using a modem connection, they use their personal computer as a remote terminal of a host computer. It's the host computer, not the user's, that has a direct, high-speed Internet connection and speaks TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), the lingua franca of computers on the Net.

Indirect Internet access can be very useful, letting dial-up users with almost any type of computer run various text-based Internet application programs (such as E-mail and file transfer) on the host computer. But they can't run Mosaic. Instead, they travel in second class, encountering clunky menus or even just a Unix prompt -- user-hostile interfaces that have more in common with 1960s technology than the current state of the art.

But Mosaic is first class -- and accordingly requires a computer with its own direct, high-speed TCP/IP connection. Until recently, that type of connection normally has been established by using a piece of hardware called a router to link an entire local area computer network (LAN) to the Internet by means of a leased digital telephone line to a service provider.

That solution -- connecting networks to networks, or "internetworking" -- has numerous advantages, the foremost of which is that it can be adapted easily from a small to a grand scale: A single line can provide direct Internet access at high speeds to all computers on the LAN simultaneously. Unfortunately, internetworking also requires the greatest initial investment, planning, and technical expertise. What's more, a significant number of schools have yet to put LANs in their computer labs -- a necessary first step to internetworking.

The good news is the dichotomy between Mosaic haves and have-nots is about to slip into history. Rushing to cash in on a hot product, a range of companies are releasing software packages and selling Internet connections designed to bring the power of Mosaic to the vast market of individual dial-up users.

The significance of these products is that they allow Mosaic to be used with just a personal computer, a modem, and a regular analog phone line -- something which has been technically possible yet exceedingly difficult to do until now.

Because much of the necessary software did not exist in commercial form until recently, making a personal computer with a modem Mosaic-capable typically has meant scrounging software archives on the Internet for a melange of unsupported and "buggy" networking shareware, configuring everything manually, and praying that all the pieces will work together. Then there's the job of finding a local service provider able to furnish the special dial-up SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) or PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol) connections that allow TCP/IP to work over a phone line. Typically, do-it-yourself networking has required too much technical expertise, time, and tolerance for frustration to be a realistic option for most people.

Not anymore. Now you can purchase a software package that includes everything you need to run a full-fledged direct Internet connection -- including Mosaic -- on your personal computer. Hitch a ride along with Electronic School, then, as we test-drive the first of these products to hit the market: Internet In A Box.

Have Mosaic, will surf

When Internet In A Box finally appeared in software stores in the fall of 1994 after several delays, customers wasted little time picking it up: 16,000 copies were sold during the first six weeks, according to software developer SPRY Inc., which developed the product jointly with computer book publisher O'Reilly and Associates.

Available for the Windows platform for a retail price of roughly $100 (a Macintosh version is in the works), Internet In A Box offers AIR Mosaic, a commercially enhanced version of the freely available NCSA Mosaic, which SPRY (along with about 20 other companies) has purchased a license to develop and resell.

In addition to AIR Mosaic and the necessary networking software to establish a dial-up TCP/IP connection to the Internet, Internet In A Box also contains SPRY's AIR suite of the most common Internet applications. You can send and receive E-mail, transfer files directly to your PC using FTP (File Transfer Protocol), log in to other computers on the Internet using TELNET, search for and retrieve menu-based information from Gopher servers, and read and post messages to USENET newsgroups -- a globally distributed bulletin board system.

Because setting up a connection can be a fairly complicated task, Internet In A Box offers users the tempting option of "instant access" through InterServ, a commercial Internet service provider. By that option, Internet In A Box configures itself automatically for use with InterServ, putting you on-line in minutes without having to do much more than type in your credit card number. Dial-up access to InterServ uses a SprintLink 800 number -- a useful feature for those who otherwise would have to call long-distance to reach an Internet service provider.

Unfortunately, the luxuries of easy setup and 800-number access do not come cheap. Although the fee for the InterServ/SprintLink access option is only $8.95 per month, users also must pay $8.95 per hour of connect time. The seductive (and often slow) nature of Mosaic makes it a bad candidate for this kind of pricing scheme, which easily could result in a monthly billing disaster.

As an alternative, users may choose any local service provider that supplies PPP connections to the Internet. If you live in a metropolitan area, you should be able to find one within your local calling area. (To receive a listing of dial-up Internet service providers, send E-mail to info-deli-server@netcom.com with the command send pdial in the subject field of the message; the list will be E-mailed to you in return. Or, you may try InterNIC Information Services at 619/455-4600 for help.)

For the purposes of this review, Electronic School selected Digital Express Group Inc., a Maryland-based service provider that furnishes PPP service for $25 per month, with six free hours of connect time per day included in the price. As a bonus, Digital Express' PPP service includes a provision for indirect Internet access at a remote terminal, which can be useful for reaching your account from someone else's computer to read your E-mail.

But there's a price to be paid for any bargain. After waiting two and a half weeks for the account to be activated, we then had to configure Internet In A Box manually, using information the service provider supplied. Although not terribly difficult, the process exposes one to the naked plumbing of the Internet -- hostnames, IP addresses, net masks, domain name servers, POP3 versus SMTP mail protocols, and the like. After about two hours and several calls both to SPRY and Digital Express tech support, we finally were "on the Net" and ready to surf.

In use, initial impressions of Internet In A Box and AIR Mosaic are a sense of wonderment at the magic of global multimedia networking on the desktop, alternating with occasional teeth-gnashing frustration when things don't work and you realize some of the hardships of being a technology pioneer. The minimum hardware requirements for Internet In A Box are a computer with at least an 80386 CPU, 4 MB RAM, Windows 3.1, and a 9600-baud (bits per second) modem. But even on a PC with an 80486 CPU running at 50 MHz, 8 MB RAM, and a 14,400-baud modem, Internet In A Box was a heavy drain on system resources and crashed often. (A maintenance upgrade released in January fixed several -- though not all -- bugs in the software suite.)

Slow transmission speed is perhaps the greatest concern with any version of Mosaic used with a modem, due to the sheer size of the embedded graphic images that allow Mosaic to display pretty, magazine-like documents. Retrieving a page can take anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes, although most pages take about a minute.

And because TCP/IP is a packet-switching technology, in which your data must share bandwidth on the same circuits that everybody else uses, the actual speed of your connection varies from one instant to the next according to the level of traffic on the Internet. The end result can be simultaneously wonderful and maddening, like trying to sip chocolate mousse through a straw.

Browsing the Web

Mosaic takes its name from its ability to access information using a variety of Internet tools and then combine and present the pieces in a unified graphical interface. The idea is to do away with the need to switch between several single-purpose programs when searching for information. Mosaic "knows" how to retrieve information using the FTP and Gopher protocols, and it also has limited ability to send E-mail and read USENET newsgroups. In addition, it can invoke other applications that it does not handle directly, such as remote login using TELNET.

Mosaic's primary function, however, is to serve as a "browser" for the World Wide Web (WWW, or simply "the Web") -- an open standard for organizing, linking, transporting, and presenting multimedia documents on the Internet. The Web identifies resources on the Internet using Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), transports documents by means of the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and formats hypermedia documents for display using HyperText Markup Language (HTML).

The Web concept dates to 1991, but didn't catch on fully until Mosaic came along in 1993 to exploit the idea's potential.

So far, Mosaic has been getting most of the attention, but it's not the only Web browser in town. Information on the Web can be accessed using any of a number of different Web browsers, most of which are available for free on the Internet.

Ironically, Mosaic has spurred the growth of information on the Web to such an extent that its importance as a browser is being eclipsed by the significance of the information it is designed to access. With a variety of Web browsers to choose from and new ones being released with increasing frequency, the choice of Web browser soon will become a matter of taste, akin to choosing a word processor. Access to the Web is the important issue -- not the browser. (See sidebar: "Other Windows To The Web")

Moreover, a Web browser does not have to be graphical. This point is worth keeping in mind for dial-up Internet users in schools for whom products such as Internet In A Box are not realistic options. Many schools do not have sufficiently current PC hardware to run TCP/IP applications, and in some locations, SLIP or PPP connections are unobtainable or simply too expensive.

Yet even a 10-year-old PC with a 2400-baud modem can be used to connect as a terminal to an Internet service provider and run Lynx -- a popular text-only Web browser -- on the host computer. It's not as pretty, but the information is all there. What's more, because Lynx skips downloading the images, it is a much faster solution than Mosaic. By virtue of running on the host computer, it is also more stable than Mosaic running on a PC.

Not surprisingly, most of the estimated 100,000 K-12 Web users are using Lynx, according to John Clement of CNIDR.

Mosaic isn't always the best solution for schools that have LANs connected directly to the Internet, either. In many cases, scarce bandwidth has prompted school network administrators to offer students access to Lynx, rather than Mosaic.

"We are not providing Mosaic access at this point because of the bandwidth concern," says Cynthia LaPier at the SCT BOCES computer services center in Elmira, N.Y. "Right now our Internet connection is 56 Kbps [kilobits per second]. Because our network also supports student reporting, financial, personnel, and all the administrative stuff, as well as the Internet, we are hesitant to offer Mosaic. I find Lynx to be almost as effective as Mosaic for most situations."

As funds become available, schools can increase the speed of their Internet connection to enable use of Mosaic. "One thing is for certain: Bandwidth -- like memory and disk space -- is something you can never have enough of," says Farley Stewart of Internet Products Inc., a company that assists education organizations in connecting to the Internet.

"We find Mosaic to be a very useful tool for schools, far superior to a command-line [text] interface. However, even 56 Kbps connections bog down when a classroom of students all try to access the same site," Stewart adds.

Yet with so many options for accessing information on the Web -- graphical or text-based browser, modem or LAN, direct or indirect connection -- your school should be able to find at least one way to plug in to one of the most remarkable communication and learning phenomena of our time.