To get back to the top, click on the orange bar on the left of the text.
The Virtual World
Page Index
Chapter Index
Introduction
History
Getting Connected
Browsers
Copyright
Search
Engines
HTML
Linking documents
Images
Newsgroups
Tables
Forms
Frames
Graphic crunching
Page Design
Publishing
Javascript
Free Stuff
Styles
DHTML
Getting ConnectedThe small private customer will typically phone an ISP, and ask a few questions (I will suggest the kind of questions that should be asked in a later section), and, depending on the answers, may decide to join up. Typical fees for a year's connection facilities will be £100 plus VAT. Anything less than this represents a good deal. However, expect prices to fall with the passage of time. I would not, however, expect fees to fall below £5 per month in the forseeable future. On the other hand, the forseeable future when dealing with the Internet is probably less than a year.
We now do have connections that are free, but there are problems with such connections. In the first instance, bandwidth is not always of the best, which means you dial in hoping to get connected, but you don't connect to the ISP because they have run out of lines.
Another problem with free providers is that they have to make their money somewhere, and that usually means by carrying acres of advertising. If they don't carry advertising now, expect it to start appearing within the next six months on your favourite free provider.
There are two very definite sorts of provider. The ones you will have heard about who will give you a connection, half a dozen email addresses, and 5 or 10 megabytes of free web space. They are for the non-commercial users.
The commercial providers will expect you to be receiving a far greater amount of hits from your potential customers, and will therefore have more bandwidth available for each client. They will generally have faster lines, and will be linked to a company that provides what are called the backbone connections. That is, the big, digital trunk lines.
They will also expect you to be running all sorts of fancy scripts, be able to deal with security issues as a matter of routine, and they will charge more for this service. Expect to pay at least £150 a year for a decent commercial web site provider.
Hardware
Connecting is relatively simple. In the first place you need the right hardware. That means a reasonable computer. It is possible to connect with a small ancient machine, but you will only be able to receive a basic service. A serious user would typically have a machine with at least a clock speed of 200Hz, 32Mg of RAM and a 2.4Gb hard drive with an external drive, CD-ROM bay, and a 17" monitor.
You could get away with a much slower clock speed and a minimum of 24Mg of RAM, and a small hard drive (512Mg) and a minimum of a 14" monitor.
Some of you may complain at that minimum spec, but your average web page is designed to take up at least 500 pixels in width, or possibly 600. It depends on what machine you have, but if you assume there are between 70 and 80 pixels per inch displayed on your monitor you can work out what width your screen needs to be. With computers that contain 72 pixels per inch you are looking at approximately eight and a half inches. If you add the borders and scroll bars, you are sensibly looking at a screen width of about nine inches minimum.
A fourteen inch monitor will have a width of about nine inches (the advertised screen size represents the diagonal measurement), and a depth of about eight inches. (Screen size rarely measures up to the advertised figure in any event, and can sometimes be up to two inches less than advertised.) You will notice that once you have your web surfing software loaded and running you will have a status bar at the bottom of your screen, a title bar, menus, a row of buttons and a location bar at the top. It is true that you can switch off a lot of these, but the default setting would take up about a third of your screen depth on a 14" monitor. In short, you won't have a lot of room to look at those web pages.
With regard to clock speed: all I can say is that the faster your machine can go, the better it will be able to cope with the more memory-hungry pages that are out there. You will certainly need a fast machine to cope with large graphics and Java applets.
Plenty of RAM is, however, essential. Let us assume you are a Windows 95 user. I am assuming that because if you are running DOS, or Windows 3.1, or thereabouts, you are running a sixteen bit operating system, and nowadays all the best software runs on thirtytwo bit systems. You will be running second best of everything on anything less than Windows 95. If you have Windows NT or some other version of Windows so much the better.
If you have a Mac and you are running anything prior to System 7.0 you will also be running a low grade system which simply cannot handle the modern programs. System 7.0 will run all the goodies. If you have System 8 so much the better.
With all the 32 bit operating systems you will be needing a lot of RAM just to run the system software. It all depends on how many extra bits you have loaded into your system. You should have rather a lot of extra bits to run your internet programs properly, and this means you will need somewhere in the region of 10Mb as a minimum. You will also need to have your basic Internet software (your browser) open. This will take up at least another 8Mb of RAM. If you are running Netscape with all the whistles and bells, you will need at least 12Mb, but preferably more. On top of that you will need a text program open to allow you to copy text from pages. You will probably also need a bit of space for your printer. All in all you are looking at a minimum of 24Mb.
If you intend to create web pages you are going to need more memory because you will need to have at least one page creation program open, and maybe a couple of graphics accessories.
Let us look at a typical setup. You need the operating system, you need a program like Claris HomePage, or Adobe PageMill, maybe Microsoft FrontPage. Whichever you choose it will need RAM, say 10Mg. Even if you use a graphics package such as PaintShop Pro, you still need the browser to look at your completed pages. It doesn't take a mathematical genius to realise that anything less than 32Mb is slumming it. And we are talking a minimum here. The more up-market page creation programs need 16Mb or 24Mb of RAM.
A more sensible amount of RAM for a machine is 64Mb. Bearing in mind the continued upwards pressure of ever more hungry software anyone buying a machine now should not accept less than 128Mb.
You also need plenty of hard disk space to hold your programs, and to allow for any offline browser you get to work. That needs space to copy the contents of web pages into a special folder on your hard disk. Your browser is going to demand 5Mg of space to store the pages it looks at. You are probably going to download lots of freeware and shareware from various sites, and then you need some room for those dirty pictures. It all adds up to a lot of storage space, especially when you realize you need space for your existing software and your upgrades.
On top of this, you are going to have to store all those page creation programs, and graphics software, plus a large amount of web utilities. And you need space for the actual web site you are going to create. You will presumably keep backups of previous versions of your site, but they should be kept on a separate disk. This means you should without doubt buy a portable disk drive and half a dozen disks to feed it. Something like the Zip drive would be ideal.
Your backups should never be on the same machine as your original files.
In fact, let me put it plainer:
Your backups should never be on the same machine as your original files.
You also need a modem. This converts the signal between your computer and the telephone line. Your computer is digital. Your phone line is analog. The lines going from telephone exchange to telephone exchange may be digital, but the lines that come from the exchange to your house are very probably analog.
You should make sure you buy a modem that supports the currently fastest transfer rates, and preferably one that is flash upgradable. Any modem less than 33.6K is too slow. Currently the fastest are the 56K modems. These will usually double as fax machines and answering machines, and can be programmed to run a voice mail system. Good ones can be bought for less than £100.
Don't buy a cheap modem from the States. They have a different set of telephone protocols over there and they don't necessarily work with the system over in England.
A modem that is flash upgradable or software upgradable is one that can have its settings and therefore its capabilities reset by subjecting it to a software upgrade. You usually get this from the modem manufacturer's site.
It goes without saying that you also need a telephone connection.
That's the hardware. You connect your modem into the back of your computer, and plug it into your telephone socket. Disable any call waiting system that you may have running otherwise you will get a garbage signal if someone rings in while you are online. To proceed any further you need some software.