The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

Accessing The Web From Your PC

John Le

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a distributed hypertext-based information system conceived at CERN to provide a user community with an easy way to access information. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a World Wide Web client, NCSA Mosaic, that takes advantage of the graphical user interface standards of Microsoft Windows. This Internet tool displays graphics, plays sound and even runs movies (as long as you have the equipment to support it).

If your PC can get to the Internet directly, you can make use of the Mosaic browser program. As soon as you have the necessary files in place, you will discover how "user friendly" the Internet can be. Mosaic allows you to point and click your way around the "Web" via the net's HyperText Markup Language (HTML) interface based on screens with hypertext links. Unlike most of the Internet, the WWW is colorful and because of that, it offers excitement beyond the fact that the net houses hordes of information.

Unlike the Internet tools Lynx or Gopher where you are offered text lists, Mosaic offers you a page with formatted text, clear highlights and colorful graphics. Instead of typing arcane FTP commands, you simply click the file you want and wait for it to download.

Where To Get the Software
One of the nice things about Mosaic software is that it is free! As soon as you get your computer connected to the net, you can download Mosaic from an FTP site. Then it is a matter of installing it on your system, just as if you bought it from the store.

To get to Mosaic, anonymous FTP to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu and enter the directory Web/Mosaic/Window. Here you will find wmos20b3.exe which is the main program, and w32sOLE.exe, the Windows 32-bit software you will need to run it. In the /Web/Mosaic/Windows/sockets is the winsock.zip file. This file is a Windows 1.1 compliant sockets Dynamic Link Library (winsock.dll) which is necessary to use Mosaic as an Internet information browser. The winsock.dll provides necessary TCP/IP networking environment under Windows. In the directory, /Web/Mosaic/Windows/viewers, are the viewer tools like lview, gswin and mpeg.

Files extended with .zip indicate that the file is in a compressed archive format. The extension .exe can also indicate a self-extracting compressed archive file. In the case of the .exe (self-extracting) files you should create a directory and type the name of the file to decompress its contents. If you need a copy of the SHAREWARE utility PKWare (zip and unzip), you can find it at the NCSA ftp server in the /PC/Windows/Contrib directory. The file, pkz204g.exe is a self extracting executable file. I recommend you put it in its own directory and type pkz204g. The program will unzip itself.

Installation Guide For w32sOLE.exe
After you have downloaded the w32sOLE.exe file to your local system:

1. Create a temporary directory called c:install.
2. With File manager, drag and drop w32sOLE.exe into c:\install.
3. Close all applications and exit to DOS (to avoid installation problems).
4. CD into c:install, and type w32sOLE. This program will create two new files Install.bat and w32spack.exe.
5. Type install, this will create two new directories and a number of files, and invoke the Win32s setup program, which starts Windows and finishes the installation process.
6. After the setup program has copied all the files into their proper places, you will delete the files in the c:install directory.

Installing NCSA Mosaic
For Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups:

1. Install Winsock software.
2. Make sure your w32sOLE.exe is properly installed.
3. Decompress wmos20b3.exe into a temporary directory.
4. Run setup.exe.
5. Delete the files in the temporary directory.
6. Double click on the Mosaic icon.
7. Read the remotes.htm file.
8. Click on "File," when the submenu appears,
9. click on "Open Local File."
10. Double click on the remotes.htm.

When you first boot up Mosaic, a number of choices await you. From the "Starting Points" menu you can select a number of home pages. Home pages are the first page of an institution's or person's WWW section. Usually the home page contains links to sub-pages with the home page itself being an introductory document.

Other interesting areas appear in the "Starting Point" menu. First, there is a list of Gopher servers. Select one and you will see that Mosaic handles Gopher software. However, Mosaic pages tend to be more colorful than character-based Gopher lists. Also available is a list of FTP sites. Here you will discover that Mosaic lets you do anonymous FTPs with little fuss. You can enter a Lynx browser through the Telnet command and access most Lynx WWW hosts through gopher. Telnet, as you know, produces slow displays and results, and because of this Lynx's performance suffers.

The graphics that appear automatically with Web pages are called inline graphics. Graphical browsers enable you to turn off this feature. If your machine has limited memory and graphics seem to take forever to appear, I recommend that you turn off the inline image features by unchecking the Display Inline Images in the "Options" menu.

Required Environment And Software
Mosaic requires an absolute minimum of an 80386SX-based machine with 4 MB, RAM, VGA Monitor, 120+ MB, hard drive, and Windows for Workgroups with Microsoft TCP/IP-32. If you want to do any serious Internet work, you will want 80486 or faster CPU with at least 8 Meg. RAM, 340+ Meg. hard drive, SVGA monitor, and run Windows in enhanced mode.

Windows for Workgroups with a winsock.dll and the win32s (Ver. 1.25 with OLE) software must be properly installed and configured.

Note: Win32s v: 1.25 with OLE 2.02 must be installed before you install or use Mosaic Beta 3 (wmos20b3). If you are using Windows 3.x, you will need a Windows 1.1 compliant sockets Dynamic Link Library (winsock.dll) to use Mosaic as an Internet information browser. The winsock.dll provides necessary TCP/IP networking environment under Windows.

If you need a Windows 1.1 compliant Winsock, there is SHAREWARE winsock.dll from anonymous site, ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the directory of /Web/Mosaic/Windows/sockets. If you have additional questions or problems with your installation, send mail to info-pc@ecn.purdue.edu.

HTML