Road Trip! Touring the Side Roads of the Internet

By Van Landrum (IBM Corporation, Roanoke, Texas)

''This is the first of a series of articles by Van Landrum, Personal Systems' database administrator, describing the highways and side roads of the Internet. In future issues, Van will take you on road trips to the interesting places he has discovered - from the mundane to the exotic. This time Van will take you from the rooftops of Boulder, Colorado, to the coffee break room at Cambridge University in England!''

Hi! My name is Van Landrum and I am the database administrator for IBM's Personal Systems magazine as well as /AIXtra magazine and the Technical Coordinator Program. Some days I'll be sitting at my desk trying to figure out the right way to connect several database tables and execute an impossible SQL statement when I just want to yell "AARGHHH!" and give up. Well, I've found that when nothing is going right, and it feels like brain cells are dropping dead by the score, two words come to mind: ROAD TRIP! Back in the seventies I lived in Chicago, and when I got bored with the everyday life I jumped into my 1971 MGB and drove to Boston or Los Angeles or down to Houston. Now I don't have time to get into my car and drive across the country. Instead, I open up the WebExplorer and take a road trip on the Internet.

A road trip on the Internet is a wonderful way to get away from it all for a few minutes. I have always enjoyed traveling. I like to go places I haven't been before and see things I haven't seen before. I guess it's just the change of scenery that revitalizes me. There are so many interesting places to visit I wish I could make a living traveling all over the world.

I have found, however, that visiting different places through the Internet also gives me a whole new outlook on life and work. Using the WebExplorer I downloaded from IBM with the OS/2 Warp Internet Access Kit (IAK), I can visit the Capitol in Washington DC, the Louvre in Paris, colleges and universities, major corporations, electronic malls, as well as visit with people all over the world - all from the computer at my desk.

In the next several issues I'll take you along as I ride the Information Superhighway. We'll look at ways to have fun, relax, and find important information. Along the way we'll learn about other people and the work that they do as well as how they spend their free time. Hopefully you'll get ideas on how to use this new resource in your own personal way.

Riding the Internet on the WebExplorer
The WebExplorer began in June of 1994 when the World-Wide Web was beginning to gain mass appeal. IBM was developing OS/2 Warp and planning to include an Internet Access Kit. IBM looked at Mosaic, developed by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), but a few IBM programmers wanted to develop their own browser. To find out more about the IBM team that created the WebExplorer, I jumped into my WebExplorer and headed out down the Internet.

First stop was the IBM Home Page (http://www.ibm.com). This colorful page is one of IBM's access ramps to the Internet (see Figure 1). This page offers news about IBM (as I write this, the lead story is "IBM Halts Shipments of Pentium-Based Personal Computers"); a message from our CEO, Lou Gerstner, welcoming all newcomers to the IBM World-Wide Web server; and other related items about IBM and the Internet. One of the listings, "Developing WebExplorer: four folks, four months, no sleep," sounded interesting. With a click of the mouse, I took the next exit and headed for http://www.ibm.com/Features/4guys.html

Editor's Note: For a quick primer on exactly how to use the WebExplorer, see Phil Lieberman's article "A Guide to OS/2 Warp's Internet Access Kit" later in this magazine.

The article that appeared explained how David Greenwood, Barbara Walters, Scott Penberthy, and Mike Ward pulled together and built a great interface to the World-Wide Web. Not an easy task mind you, since David and Barbara were in North Carolina and Scott and Mike were in New York. The article goes on to explain how, while working late nights, they met one deadline after another to create a web browser that would take advantage of OS/2 Warp's capabilities.

Here is what they had to say about the hardships they encountered while writing the code:

''Putting together the 100,000 lines of code in WebExplorer was not without its hardships. Since the effort began as an after-hours project, quirks like automated lighting and air conditioning posed some unusual challenges.''

''"After 8 p.m., the lights go out in our building," explained Greenwood. "You have to run down the hall and push a couple buttons every 20 minutes to stay out of the dark."''

''To make matters worse, the WebExplorer code was being compiled on a 486 PC. "Each change of code took about 10 minutes to run through the compiler, so you'd get to make one or two changes; then you'd have to run down the hall and push the button to keep the lights on. That would give you enough time to run back and make one or two more changes, and then run back down the hall for the lights."''

''"And on top of that, our air conditioning shuts down at 7 p.m.," added Walters. "You have to remember that this was summertime in North Carolina."''

Just goes to show what four people can accomplish in four months if they don't mind missing a little shut-eye.

Take a trip to http://www.ibm.com/Features/4guys.html and find out the special features they added to the WebExplorer to make it worthy of OS/2 Warp.

Indiana Innovations
You'll be amazed at how some people are using the Internet. Let's visit the Center for Innovative Computer Applications at the University of Indiana. We can go see Dennis Gannon, Juan Villacis, and Shelby Yang, who have set up cameras to take pictures of their offices every three minutes. By connecting to their web server, we can see inside their offices. The address for spying on the CICA folks is http://www.cica.indiana.edu/news/spy.html. I looked in on them on January 4, 1995 at 4:33 p.m. and Shelby was the only one working.

From Indiana, let's go to the University of Colorado. There they have another innovative example of using the web. They connected a thermometer atop the CU/Boulder Engineering Center roof to a web site. By connecting to http://www.cs.colorado.edu/htbin/temp you can get the current temperature on the building. On Thursday, January 5 at 12:44:44 p.m. MST it was 35 degrees (see Figure 2). Notice the comment tells you how to "feel" the temperature using the middle mouse button!

Cambridge Coffee
Now let's extend our road trip across the Atlantic Ocean to England where we can spy on the Trojan Room coffee machine at the Cambridge University computer laboratory. Connect to URL http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html to see how much coffee is left in the pot. (I thought the beverage of interest would have been tea!)

These examples show some of the innovative ways to use the Internet. While you may not care to see Dennis Gannon's office or know how much coffee is in the pot in England, just envision ways you could make use of such technology in your company.

In the coming issues we will visit a wide range of sites, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, the White House, weather stations, NASA, colleges, electronic malls, and many others. We will see many uses for the Internet and the ways people around the world are creatively delivering information on the Information Superhighway as we travel into the 21st century.