It was fun. At the time I have pulled this off any Silicon Valley, where a lot of expertise coalesced. Still, putting Internet Room at CAR-Trek drawing two cards and straight. We got lucky.
Apple Computer was lending Macintosh computers, each with networking connections, who heads the Mercury support area, said she and her a high-speed local-area provider had already T-1 connection - that's a its network and lend us some connect the T-1 line to the would handle the network. And a Silicon Valley company computer workstations, Sparc20 computer for a Andrew Zazzi put the Sun's Shane Sigler con- Sparc workstation. We tested the on Wednesday, the day before to begin. All was well, we to the outside didn't hours we witnessed a of buck-passing. The provider said, "Not our fault." said, "Not our fault." handled the wiring from the into the Internet room, three classes Thursday, re- later in the weekend. That holding a slimmed-down ver- Internet training, showing only e- of the Internet's World was unsatisfying for everyone. Thursday, however, we got repre- phone company, Internet pro- room together and asked together to find the problem.
They finally did, and by Friday morning we had the room up and running the way we'd hoped.
Now we had a room that matched our ambition. The classes were designed to take beginners into the Internet in a basic way at first, but by the end have them surfing like veterans. We had folks log into the server, as if they were dialing by phone and modem to a local Internet provider that offered Unix shell access only. The point was to give people a taste of the low end of the Net food chain. Using Unix mail software called Pine, we had each person send e-mail to someone else and then send a reply. Next we showed people some Usenet newsgroups. We couldn't get everyone logged onto the newsgroups at once. Even on our fast network that was causing electronic traffic jams. The next step was to look at Gopher, an immensely useful Internet menu system. We used Gopher client software on the Macs to show people how they could tunnel around the world through various Gopher servers, and then search server menus using Veronica software.
Far and away the most popular and entertaining part of the class was the Mosaic playtime, in which folks surfed the Internet's World Wide Web using a Mosaic browser on each Mac. Because we were attached to the outside on a T-1 line, Mosaic ran fast enough to allow reasonably quick loading of images.
The system worked wonderfully all day Friday and Saturday morning. There were no Internet classes Saturday afternoon. That evening, the Mosaic software had stopped connecting to the outside world, as had the Gopher software loaded on the Macs. I still have no idea what went wrong.
On Sunday night we all rested.
Lessons from San Jose
1) If you're setting up a newsroom Internet server, don't try to do it overnight. This stuff still isn't easy. Make sure you have a Unix guru in-house. 2) Expect problems. One of Murphy's laws is that Murphy attends all live demonstrations, something we proved at CAR-Trek. 3) Look at new systems from Internet-savvy vendors such as Sun Microsystems Sun's Netra, in particular - if you're planning to bring the Internet into your building. Netra is billed as a server that makes it easy to connect PC and Mac clients.
Although we were somewhat constrained by losing the Mac-based Gopher and Mosaic, we still were able to offer some solid Net instruction. We used the telnet capabilities of the server to log onto other computers in other cities, where we could run the Unix Gopher software on those remote systems. That alone demonstrated a vital feature of the Internet. For World Wide Web surfing we used a remote machine that ran a character-based Web browser called Lynx. It wasn't nearly as much fun as Mosaic, but it did work.