Bad Trip

 

But, she adds, I can procure Mosaic on my own "via FTP from the site ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu." Of course.

After 13 phone calls, five faxes, nine days, and $69.50, I get IP service through a SLIP connection from Netcom, a national gateway provider based in San Jose, Calif. Now, with the pipeline installed, I buzz over to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (uiuc.edu) to pluck Mosaic from its archives. I knock on the door with FTP, a file-transfer program. Can't get in. Try to FTP again. No go. Try really hard again and again. Server is busy, busy, busy. Channels are clogged. No room for another desperate, anonymous user at any hour of the day or night. But I don't bag it all to read the news in alt.sex, as a normal user would. No, I call upon archie, a tool for searching archives, to look for alternative sites. In my best UNIX, I type archie -h Archie.ans.net Mosaic.

I find it at Yale (cs.yale.edu) and burrow through the directories to locate it in /pub/MS-Windows/NCSA. I cross my fingers, issue my fetch command, and wait for Mosaic to heed my call. Beyond my wildest imaginings, it does. I am actually FTP-ing my grail. My ticket to fame, fortune, and hassle-free adventure on the Internet has just been punched. It takes 20 minutes to FTP this mother of a program (it weighs 92 bazillion bytes or so), and when it lands, it squats on my disk like a huge memory omnivore. But it's mine. After 50 hours on-line, I declare victory. I'm poised to point and click my way into business.

But to my horror, I discover I still need IP software to make my SLIP connection recognize my terminal. And the Mosaic documentation informs me I should have something else, called Winsockets, to make the IP software work with Windows. Celebration aborted.

I follow the instructions, which say to buy Winsockets lest I end up with an incomplete or bug-riddled version from the Net. When I explain my problem to the guy at Egghead Software, he shows me a flight-simulator game. No, no. I need full-metal communications utilities, I explain. His screen goes blank. I resign myself to take what I can get from the Net.

Though detoured, I am no longer going this alone. In the true spirit of entrepreneurship, I finagle free expertise from a friend with a computer-science degree from Yale and a black belt in cybersurfing.

Date: Thu, 28 Apr 1994 14:28:39

-0400 (EDT)

From: Anne M Murphy amurphworld.std.com>

To: lfosomewhere.else

Subject: a desperate plea for help

Luis -- you MUST come to my aid. I am hopelessly lost on the Internet and fear I might die before I ever learn to speak UNIX. What do you want in exchange for a short seminar on navigating the Net? Dinner? Dessert? You name it: if you can get me out of this mess, I'll do it. I mean, I am WAY over my head. Awaiting a rescue, Anne.

He accedes after more shameless groveling. Once I've plied him with pasta puttanesca, Luis and I rummage around Washington University at St. Louis to find and FTP Winsockets. We try to unzip it -- it is a massive, compressed file -- but can't until we fish the Net again for a copy of pkunzip, which will allow us to open the Winsockets program, which will permit us to run the Mosaic program, which will enable us to navigate the Net, which of course we already had to KNOW HOW TO DO to get the interface to run IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Virtual Rule Number Four: The Internet is tautological. To master it, all you have to know is how to master it. Or, as Luis says, "If you don't have a pet geek, don't even bother."

Eventually, we assemble the battery of software needed to run Mosaic and spend the remaining hours of the night installing and debugging. (I'm mainly eating cookies through this part, but I try to look attentive.) Finally, Luis invokes Mosaic. Pop goes the window. Bing, here come the buttons to click. Crash falls the system.

The third time's the charm, and in a moment of profound anticlimax, Mosaic slouches toward me. I agree to a quick tour. I'm too tired and near blind to conduct a full exploration. I beckon a binary file the on-line tour guide recommends.

About seven minutes later there appears on my screen a picture of a statue of a stone heroine rendered in classical Greek style with her arms cast wide. Is this Our Lady of the Internet, welcoming me to the wonders of a menu-driven world? Or is it just a pig of a binary file, signifying nothing? I may never know. But my rite of passage is complete. I'm heading back to check out the market for elephant dung. And I'll give deeper consideration to groundfish. If neither pans out, I'll found a national organization of Internet survivors, complete with books, videos, CD-ROMs, and an electronic bulletin board for the virtually impaired. Naturally, we'll negotiate rights to the movie, a feature-length film about cruising the information superhighway. Working title: Revenge of the Roadkill.

For those still willing to risk a ride on the Internet, take my advice: Crack the help files. Learn to make a good puttanesca sauce. And find yourself a Luis.

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