The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : The Net’s Best Leapfrogging Tool

For years, electronic mail has been the “killer app” of cyberspace, the compelling application that motivates people to take the time and trouble to enter this strange new world.

Well, it’s clear by now that the next such on-line killer app is the World Wide Web, which in the weeks ahead will become accessible even to casual users of on-line services. If you’ve never used the Web, or if you have been unable to access it with the kind of sophisticated software that takes full advantage of its great power, you’ll be amazed at what a marvelous system this is for searching, learning and exploring.

The only downside is that the Web threatens to make people like me obsolete. Surfing and scouring the Web lately with top-notch “browsing” software, I find my skills with such Internet tools as gopher, veronica, ftp and so forth becoming rusty, because everything is so much easier within the architecture of the Web.

The first thing to understand about the Web is that it isn’t a place in any literal sense. It’s simply a terrific way of organizing and linking information. Conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, the Web began to take off four years later with the invention of Mosaic, a graphically oriented browsing program, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.

The Web’s essential charm is hypertext, which means that when you’re reading something about Turkey and Istanbul is mentioned, it’s probably highlighted, indicating you can jump from it to a separate page on the city. The Istanbul page might in turn contain links to pages for museums, Turkish culture, recipes for Turkish and other kinds of coffee, and so on.

These pages can all be living on different computers--on different continents, even--but are easily reached because documents can refer to one another by their unique Universal Resource Locator, or URL. A typical URL might be https://www.ibm.com. (Http stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which describes a set of rules networks follow in exchanging Web information.)

But the Web isn’t just text. It’s also pictures--the Istanbul page might sport a map, for instance--and, increasingly, sound and even video. Best of all, users can set up their own pages with relative ease, about which I’ll have more to say in a later column. The Web offers to fulfill a good part of the promise of any real information highway by permitting almost anyone to become a provider as well as consumer of information.

How do you access the Web? More and more easily. For most home users, I recommend the Big Three on-line services, though America Online’s web browser is not available just yet.

More experienced denizens of cyberspace have other options. The one I favor is easily the cheapest for any true Web addict without institutional access, and well within the ability of a moderately savvy user. True geeks will already know all about it. If you’re in neither category, read the rest of this column at your own risk, and for God’s sake, please don’t try this at home.

OK, here’s what I do. I have a standard Internet shell account from a cut-rate provider (I use Netcom), and then I use a $25 shareware program called The Internet Adapter, or TIA, which I’ve installed in my home directory on Netcom’s computer. TIA performs the amazing feat of making my cheap-o dial-up account act like a SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) connection, which is what you need to run a good stand-alone browser.

I then installed a program on my computer--a 486 running Microsoft Windows--called Winsock. The flavor I use, Trumpet Winsock 2.0, is also shareware.

Then I installed Netscape, the fastest and best browser I’ve ever tried. For individual users, Netscape is free, downloadable on the Internet.

This setup works beautifully, enabling me to cruise the Web for hours on end for nothing more than the $17.50 a month flat rate that Netcom charges for my dial-up account. TIA, in fact, works better than almost any computer product I have ever tried.

Using it, I can even run programs on my own computer for electronic mail, gopher, ftp and other Internet functions. I don’t use them, though; I find it easier to use PINE for e-mail, and I do the rest from the command line.

For introductory information on TIA, send blank e-mail to tia-info@marketplace.com. You’ll need to make sure you get the right version of TIA to work on your host’s computer, and you’ll also have to configure Winsock. TIA offers information on getting Netscape and other Winsock clients. SoftAware, the Marina del Rey firm that markets TIA, is also coming out sometime this year with a new version of its Cheap Sunglasses package, which combines TIA, a license, a how-to book, Netscape and some other Internet tools. The current edition costs $65.

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Ways to Be a Web Crawler

The easiest way to enjoy the World Wide Web is to use one of the Big Three on-line services.

CompuServe is offering free NetLauncher software (goInternet) containing its SPRY Mosaic Web browser and a dialer that accesses a special kind of Internet connection called Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP, which means you can use Netscape or any other Winsock-compatible application. CompuServe’s $9.95 monthly basic service will include three free hours of Internet access this way, including the Web. Additional hours will be $2.50 each. CompuServe is also offering 20 hours of Internet access for $15 a month (in addition to the basic $9.95), plus additional Internet hours at $1.95 each.

America Online says it plans to offer a Web browser by early May. Users I know who’ve tried the beta version say this browser is tightly integrated with AOL’s already nicely arranged interface, offering users a seamless way to access electronic mail, AOL’s offerings and the Web at the click of a mouse. Web access will be included in the regular AOL charges: $9.95 a month for five hours, $2.95 for each additional hour.

Both services are playing catch-up to Prodigy, which has offered quite a nice browser (jump World Wide Web) for some time now. Prodigy officials have said the browser is hugely popular with its users. Access is $2.95 an hour.

* Next week: What to see--and how to find it--on the Web.

* Daniel Akst welcomes messages at akstd@news.la times.com but regrets that he cannot reply to every one.