DAV EY WINDER
Davey takes a wistful look back at issue one of PC Pro, where he covered the long-gone FoneCost for Windows, Lynx and NetManage Chameleon Suite
Davey takes a wistful look back at issue one of PC Pro, where he covered the long-gone FoneCost for Windows, Lynx and NetManage Chameleon Suite.
The Real World Computing section made its debut back in the very first issue of PC Pro, which should come as no real surprise to anyone. Perhaps more surprising, though, is the fact that of the original ten RWC contributors only two have survived this incredible journey and are still here where it all began. It almost goes without saying that one of them is the inimitable Jon Honeyball, a man in whose company I am very glad to be included. Yep, I was right there in November 1994 with my “On Line” column (note it was two words) with the somewhat cheesy strapline of “you can bet that whatever’s going on in the world of communications, ‘Wavey’ Davey Winder is there first”.
A lot has changed in those 25 years, not least the terminology: comms has as little relevance today as the information superhighway or, for that matter, Wavey Davey. I thought it might be fun, for my 300th “Real World” column for PC Pro, to look at just how much things have changed by using issue one as a yardstick.
The very first thing I wrote about back then is a great example of change. I reviewed a small utility by the name of FoneCost for Windows, which, as you can guess, tracked how much your online activity was costing you. Without wishing to sound too much like I’ve dropped into Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, the vast majority of our younger readers simply wouldn’t believe it if faced with the notion of not only having to pay to access online services, but also having to factor in the cost of the telephone call your modem was making.
Yet that was the reality for those of us going online back then, as was the requirement to have more than a little technical knowledge to achieve
anything once you arrived in cyberspace. Downloading a file was far from a straightforward experience. Very slowly moving a pornographic image… erm, I mean programming tutorial document from the host server to your computer involved FTP. The file transfer protocol was the equivalent of clicking on a link, but downloading the target file could literally take hours and involved using a command line interface to connect to an anonymous FTP site (obviously, nobody wanted anyone else to know they were so interested in Python or Visual Basic).
Luckily, at around the same time that PC Pro launched, there were application suites that strove to make connecting to the Net (yet another term I used way too often looking back) as simple as possible without dumbing down the functionality once there. In the first issue, I took an in-depth look at my favoured suite, NetManage Chameleon. Sure, I would go on to write extensively about such services as AOL, Cix, CompuServe and Delphi, all of which provided various degrees of “true” internet access, but Chameleon wasn’t a gateway onto the net but a direct connection, and that made all the difference.
What kind of difference? Well, in those early days, the gateway services couldn’t provide you with the ability to use a graphical web browser client or to FTP those programming photos directly to your PC. And, yes, the web was a thing by then but only just; graphical browser clients such as Cello or Mosaic were the jawdropping equivalent of virtual reality headsets when they arrived. Before, we were accessing the web using text-based clients such as Lynx, which was released in 1993. The first browser client, however, was the one that Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed himself in 1990 and was called WorldWideWeb, replaced by the Line Mode Browser in 1991 and then the aforementioned and hugely popular Lynx.
But Lynx’s popularity was shortlived: later that same year, Mosaic was released by one Marc Andreessen, who, in the year that PC Pro was born, went on to release Netscape Navigator. It’s hard to imagine now, but Netscape was then what Internet Explorer went on to become and is now bestowed upon Google Chrome: the hugely dominant, market sharecontrolling browser of choice. Nobody could foresee Netscape ever being deposed, but deposed it was.
The creative coding genius that was Andreessen didn’t come to an end when Microsoft shoved Netscape out of the way by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free; Netscape cost $49 (I can’t recall if there was a separate UK price) or came “free” as part of a subscription to pretty much any and every access service provider. What did Andreessen do in response to the rapidly declining market share of Netscape Navigator? I’ll give you a clue: the development code name for Netscape Navigator was “Mozilla”. He created the Mozilla organisation in 1998, which eventually became the Mozilla Foundation, and from which Firefox and the Thunderbird email client were later born.
Anyway, I seem to have digressed a little from the Chameleon suite, which started me down that side road of thought. If you had an account with Demon, Direct Connection or one of the other early ISPs, Chameleon was the go-to piece of software. For one, it was Windows software; for two, it supported ISDN for those folks with the truly speedy connections of the day; and for three, I could run email,
newsreader, FTP, Gopher, Telnet and Whois clients all in their own windows. Those of you who have been reading my words from day one, for which I truly apologise and offer sympathy and virtual tea, will now be lost in reflection of great things past. For everyone else, as per normal, you will be wondering what the heck I’m talking about.
Well, as hard as it is to believe today, there was a world before Google, and in that world Gopher, Archie and Veronica ruled supreme. They were how we found information online; search engines of a sort. The sort concerned being databases of the file directories of the hundreds, if not thousands by this stage, of systems that were accessible online. You would Telnet (a connection protocol) to an Archie server and search for a file name using a command line interface, which returned a directory path to be used to FTP the file in question. Gopher made this so much simpler as it stuck a menu system on top of it all, although there were multiple Gopher sites run by multiple operators so each one had its peculiarities. However, the principle was the same and the Chameleon Gopher remained my favourite for many years.
As I said in issue one: “A Gopher lets you browse the Net from a menu, collecting resources, documents, sounds and images along the way. All this is done seamlessly, without the user having to know about the connection being made to different computers in Gopherspace. The Chameleon Gopher is a totally point-and-click affair using Windows File Manager-like associations to determine the correct viewer for different file types.” It was, for me and many people who I associated with at the time, a truly revolutionary piece of kit for the online explorer. It was also bloody expensive: the full Chameleon suite started at a cool £195. Now that’s hard to swallow in today’s everything-is-free online world, where the notion of paying for content is hard enough to grasp, let alone paying for the software being used to access that content.
I will finish my reminiscing with what was surely the daftest thing I ever wrote for PC Pro, and that somehow continued for a good few years in my RWC column: the “Mad, Bad and Sad sigs” boxout ( see top
right). Signature files these days tend to be dull affairs: mine lists publications I write for and links to my website and Twitter account; yours may have a telephone number or business contact address. Back then, in 1994, sigs were a true work of art.
No really, actual art. The art in question being ASCII.
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange sounds as boring as a day-long conference on Brexit outcomes, but ASCII was anything but. There were 95 printable characters defined by the original 1963 ASCII standard and more from compliant character sets with extended characters. I first saw ASCII art when I was a proud Amiga computer user, the computer upon which I cut both my writing and hacking teeth. ASCII art, images created from text characters in a time when dot matrix printers didn’t have graphical capabilities, lent themselves to being used as labels on cracked game floppies being circulated by the various hacking groups and for the signatures we used when emailing each other. And so I thought it might be fun to run a section in PC Pro where I showcased the best, worst and funniest I came across and the feature was born. It proved a hit with readers and was far and away the thing that filled my PC Pro inbox the most, month after month. Do yourself a favour and visit Christopher Johnson’s ASCII Art Collection website asciiart. website for a trip down memory lane if you have an hour or two to spare.
The big switch: goodbye Chrome, hello Firefox
It’s almost serendipitous, given that the first graphical web client I used was Mosaic, which, as explained earlier, begat what is now Mozilla Firefox. However, the fact remains that having been a Google Chrome browser user from pretty much the initial beta release way back in 2008 (with the odd few dalliances with the likes of Opera, Tor and even IE – oh the shame) I have decided to switch full-time to using Firefox.
This isn’t my first experience with the Mozilla browser, of course, having used the SeaMonkey Mozilla application suite for a while at the end of the 1990s and into the noughties. I also played around with Phoenix and Firebird, both of which preceded the arrival of Firefox proper at the end of 2004. The privacy features drew me in back then and, ultimately, they’re what has brought me back again now.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Chrome for its functionality and especially some of the addons such as Gmelius, which I am sorely missing, buoyed only by the vague promise that a Firefox version is coming soon. What I fell out of love with is the sheer Google-ness of it all. Especially when that impacted upon another one of the add-on lines that I have found so essential and about which I wrote of in glowing terms last month: ad blockers and tracking blockers. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t seem to love them as much as I do, or indeed many thousands
“Gopher made this so much simpler as it stuck a menu system on top of it all”
of other Chrome users do. It has decided to make it much harder for the developers who create these extensions to make them work in any truly usable manner.
It’s all down to how Chrome’s webRequest API permissions system will “deprecate the blocking capabilities” in all but enterprise deployments. In other words, despite maintaining that it still supports the use and development of ad blockers, Google is changing how “browser data is shared with third parties,” which will have the effect of kiboshing the often one-man development bands behind the best blockers.
While the arguments continue on both sides as to who is doing what and when, I’ve already made my choice and jumped ship. I’m now an official Firefox Quantum user and I’ve changed to Firefox on Android as well. The ad blockers and tracking blockers I love so much, uBlock Origin and the EFF Privacy Badger, continue to work just as I would expect. The contentblocking options within Firefox itself are extensive and effective, and the use of “containers” enables privacy to be taken to a new level by separating online activities into tab-specific sessions that don’t share cookies or other data footprints between them. There’s a specific Facebook container, for example, but you can set up a news-reading one and a Twitter one, and neither social network can then track your interests and actions from the news you read. Next month I’ll go into more detail about the switch, from the security, privacy and usability perspective, as I’ve already run out of space in this column…