Duncan Ville

Times was when only a privileged few could get on the Internet superhighway and drive. That’s not so anymore. These days, there are more and more “on-ramps” for the highway, and tolls on the road are decreasing every day. Today you can speed around the Net and the Web or little more than the price of a subscription to the fruit-of-the-
month club. Your connection options include permanent direct connections, dial-up connections to local hosts, and connection to the Web via a commercial on-line service. * Permanent Direct Connections: Web Nirvana Those of us affiliated with universities, research labs, and corporations—as well as those of us with direct connections often by our cable television suppliers—are usually able to connect to the Internet via the fastest route possible: a TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) network. Whether you are at your home cable modem, a corporate office, a university, or a public library, you are likely to have access to a PC hooked to such a network connection.
Permanent direct connections are clearly the vest and quickest way to travel to and across the Internet, as they allow fast data
throughput capable of dealing swiftly with memory-fat Web graphics. Such high-speed access is vital for many applications related to scienyou tific research and communications (such as video conferencing), which require extremely fast transmissions of large amounts of data.
* Local Host Dial-Up Connections: The Next Best Thing The next most attractive alternative is to use your computer’s modem to dial-up to the network of an Internet service provider. These service providers are usually called local hosts. A local host computer runs with applications software that uses the TCP/IP protocols to com‘the municate with other Internet. (Note that for web surfing a minimum modem speed of 28.8 bps [bits per secondJ is highly recommended.)
To communicate with the Web via your local host, you must use software that enables your computer to use the TCP/IP language to communicate over local telephone lines. Here you have two choices. The first is SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) and the second and newer option is PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol). These low-cost alternatives provide hill peer access to the Internet. The difference between the two is fundamental. SLIP does not provide error correction or data compression, but it still works well for home and small-business applications. PPP was specifically developed to recti’ SLIP’s error correcting weakness. PPP checks incoming data and asks the sending computer to retransmit when it detects an error in an IP packet. Thus, of the two protocols, I recommend PPP. It’ll save you time and hassles. There are hundreds of dial-up Internet providers across the counny, many of them regional, and a number of them national.