What the ICOMM software did was to provide a means for providing local
graphical presentation for data acquired from the host, not running PPP, but
running the shell. You told ICOMM what you wanted and it figured out what to
tell your shell interface to do, then it took the data that was returned to
you and presented it graphically. There weren't many fancy graphic sites back
then, so it wasn't really much better than LYNX, but it did format the stuff
so you thought that you had a graphical interface, though it wasn't a real
GUI.
It showed the user what could be done, though there wasn't much other than
text to surf on the web, back then, and the WWW had not been "commercialized"
yet, since the gov hadn't yet given its OK for commercial web use.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tothwolf" <tothwolf(a)concentric.net>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 26, 2002 12:54 PM
Subject: Re: Netscape (was Re: PayPal = payola?)
On Sat, 26 Jan 2002, Richard Erlacher wrote:
On Sat, 25 Jan 2002, Tothwolf wrote:
<snip>
The ICOMM software went a long way if you had
only shell access,
though. I provided the appearance of a graphical browser, though it
did that by using shell-accessible features at the ISP, though it ran
the graphical stuff locally, thereby giving the appearance of a
graphical browser. It didn't need a WINSOCK, since it ran the IP
stack at the ISP end.
I never used the ICOMM software you describe. The first TCP/IP I had
access to at home was slip. I used a unix program called slirp with
trumpet for quite awhile before I moved to a standard slip/ppp connection.
-Toth