I've been here since September, newly transplanted from a dairy farm in Colorado, and have been an avid net surfer ever since. I started using computers 26+ years ago, but suddenly I was exposed to Mosaic and Netscape. These browsers have been around a lot longer than my awareness of them, but to me it was an answer to dreams of long ago. With high speed phone lines at work and my new 14.4 modem at home, new worlds of knowledge opened up.(In a past life I taught physics so knowledge is #1 with me.)

While browsers are great, I found myself downloading files that dissappeared to who-knew-where and upon finding them, I was uncertain as to what my next step should be. Then, I'd find that I didn't have anything that would let me view an Mpeg file or to listen to the sounds or whatever.

I'm going to try to give you links to all of the readers and views and players and unstuffers that I know about and will certainly add anything to this net survival kit that more experienced surfers would like to infom me about.

Remember: only use these tools for good.

Bob's Web Survival Kit

Macintosh

• Browsers:
  • NCSA Mosaic
  • EI Net's MacWeb
  • Netscape Communications Netscape

• Useful Utilities
  • QuickTime: QuickTime is a sytem extension that is required to view several of the file formats that are common on the net.If you still haven't got it, take a trip to Apple for version 1.6.2.
  • JPEGView, a free graphics viewer from Aaron Giles.
  • Sparkle - can play both Quicktime and MPEG movies.
  • SoundMachine will play most types of sound files.
  • StuffIt Expander 3.5.1 - This free software allows you to unpack multiple types of compression and encoding schemes.
  • Telnet 2.6 and the documentation.

Windows

• Browsers: As with the Macintosh platform, most browsers for Windows that support forms are in testing. The three that I have used the most are NCSA Mosaic, EINet's WinWeb, and Netscape Communications Netscape.
• QuickTime: QuickTime is a very cool technology from Apple Computers that allows you to digitize video and sound and play it back without expensive hardware decoders. Apple has put version 1.1.1 for Windows out on the Internet. Set your Web client to load to disk, click here to download this version, and follow the instructions below.
  1. After downloading this file to your disk, unzip it with PKUZIP using the -d switch:

     pkunzip -d qtw111.zip

     This will make two directories called DISK1 and DISK2.

  2. XCOPY the contents of the DISK1 directory to a blank, high-density floppy disk labeled as DISK1:

     cd DISK1
xcopy *.* a: /s /e
label a: DISK1

     XCOPY the contents of DISK2 to a blank, high-density floppy labeled as DISK2. Copying the files to floppies is important; QuickTime for Windows SETUP will only install from floppy disk.

  3. Start Windows and run SETUP from the floppy disk labeled DISK1.
• JPEG Viewers: Lview is a very good freeware viewer for GIFs and JPEGs. (Have your client set to load to disk befor selecting this link.)

UNIX

• Browsers: Two popular browsers are NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Communications Netscape.
• QuickTime: Yes, there is a QuickTime viewer for UNIX. It is xanim, and it is good. It plays lots of other animation formats too.
• JPEG Viewer: xv views JPEGs and most other graphics formats known to man.