Out of courtesy, first place in this list must go to the provider of my humble website, Agora(sm). This is administered by Alan Batie in his spare time; & since he is a full time employee of Intel, the fact he does a good job in the little time he has is all the more commendable.
Next is the obligatory mention of Netscape resources. A couple resources that visitors may not be aware of include Joshua ``Mad Dog" Keroes' Mac Netscape Clinic, as well as The Unofficial Netscape FAQ. There is more information & further links in these pages than I could ever accumulate.

Since the average 'Net Surfer will be using Netscape with a modem, he will want to know about John Navas' 28800 Modem FAQ, a regular storehouse of information, as well as Curt's High Speed Modem page. If you are too cheap to afford a real modem, & think a 2400 baud modem on the electronic equivalent of Angel Dust is good enough for you, then study the latest revision of the RPI Modem FAQ, & maybe you can actually make this abomination work. And unless you are using the Personal Edition, for your stack & dialer, you have Trumpet Winsock on your system, and will want to know about Lynn Arrow's Trumpet Winsock Troubleshooting Reference, Trumpet Software International's Home Page & the alt.winsock FAQ.

And every Netscape user will want to know more information about Netscape extensions to the HTML Standard. Charlton Rice's tutorial explains how to use frames in a simpler way than Netscape's own explanation. If you like to have active images, but do not look forward to the difficulty of learning Java, explore the gif89a format for graphic files, which Royal Frazier explains carefully & fully. Last is the mystery of Javascript, a little language that Netscape created to extend the power of their browser, beginning with version 2.0. Andy Augustine maintains the FAQ, & there is a newsgroup, & there was a mailing list that stopped in March of 1996, but you can still access the archives. Many resources for Javascript can be found at the JavaScript Index, & a good tutorial was written by Voodo in Germany.

I believe that the operating platform that will come into its own with the success of the Internet is not something from Redmond, but Linux. For the first time the average computer nerd who enjoys exploring new software for the sake of learning can afford to see what the hellabulloo is about Unix first-hand, & realize that Microsoft's operating systems have unconscionable flaws in them that should never have been allowed to be seen by the public in the first place. (But this is a topic for one of my pet peeves.)

You can read all about Linux at the source, Sunsite. However, if you want to download the actual software itself, don't go to Sunsite, but either to Walnut Creek's site, or InfoMagic. There is also a User's group in the Portland area, The Portland Linux User's Group. A piece of the history of the Linux OS can be found in the Flame War between Linus Torvald and Andrew Tannenbaum that occured some years back.

Next is the computer that we should all then run Linux on - something built on the DEC Alpha processor. I aware of the Linux port to the Power Mac, but this little baby runs circles around both the Power PC chip & the Intel Pentium. David Mosberger-Tang has been maintaining the Linux Alpha Port Home Page. Distributions already exist for the Alpha chip: there is a demonstration version, Blade from DEC, (this is only of historical interest, though), & a beta version from Red Hat. While my present plan, (once I have the money saved), is to assemble the workstation from the motherboard up, I am browsing vendors home pages constantly for deals on a DEC workstation running Linux, & if I find any worthwhile links, I'll add them to this page.
For computer-related research, I find myself revisiting a select few sites. I find that Dr Dobbs' Journal frequently has pointers to the information that I'm looking for, while ora.com has information about their Unix publications, as well as Andrew Schulman's latest research on MS-Windows. And since I have to support that platform, I do use the Micro$oft Knowledge Database. NPAC maintains a searchable database of computer-related newsgroups & mailing lists, while DEC has the extensive Alta Vista database (which so far has declined to accept my request to register my web page). The Linux Journal also has an online searchable man page for many of the Unix commands.
I'd also like to collect together some resources about the future of the Web. First is the search for a means that will move Web sites from mere bulletin boards of text & pictures to true interactive sites. Part of this work focusses on the < EMBED > tag, the API to which a company called Eolas claims the copyright, offering it free for nonprofit use as long as their standard is met. (However, Real Audio also uses the < EMBED > tag for their audio server.)

The conventional wisdom is betting on Java, an object-oriented language, which has an official home page at Sun Microsystems, & its own newsgroup & a number of Web resources like Digital Espresso. Two FAQs that are equally useful are maintained by D'Arcy Smith, & Elliotte Harold. A small software company called Nombas complains that there is more hype than substance in Java, pointing out that they've offered an interactive language like Java for a couple of years now. I guess the difference between Nombas' offering & Java is that Java's bringing together a number of companies around an open standard - Netscape, Borland, Symantec, & even the Linux community, where Nombas' offering is the work of one lone company. This wide-spread endorsement of Java has forced even Micro$oft away from their proprietary approach to software and at least claim to adopt Java in their browser.

Java has official ports to Windows 95, Windows NT, & Solaris, but there are unofficial ports to platforms such as OS/2, Macintosh System 7.5, and also Linux. The Linux port requires support for threading, so you need to have a kernel that supports the ELF executable format, as well as the proper libraries to compile the ELF binaries. The details are explained in the ELF Howto. Check out the Java HOWTO at the Blackdown Organization for all of the steps.

Another important development is Virtual Reality Markup Language (or VRML). This is intended to create portions of three-dimensional space that browsers compliant with this standard can explore. The excitement greeting this development is due to the widespread hope that the Internet will begin to resemble the Cyberspace described in William Gibson's Neuromancer. The standards for this are still developing: Version 1.0 of the standards was finalized early in 1995, but after various weaknesses were found, a Version 2.0 is evolving, modeled after Silicon Graphic's Moving Worlds. Some good places to start researching: the San Diego SuperComputing Center's useful VRML Repository & Wired's Forum about VRML. A VRML consortium has been formed to keep the technology from being lost to business interests.

Dimension X is creating a VRML toolkit called Liquid Reality that will bring VRML to Java applets, as well as promising VRML support under Linux. Aereal Inc. not only maintains a FAQ on VRML/Java/Javascript, but offers a method to create your own Instant VRML Home World. Lastly, Stan Melox, a programmer with the Alberta Research Council's VR Lab has created a Netscape UNIX plug-in to add Open GL support to Perl scripts.

This page last revised on 26 May 1996.