Welcome to old-style Internet access -- souped up for your surfing pleasure! In this chapter I take you on a fast flight through the few Macintosh programs that can work over a Unix command-line interface (usually known as a Unix shell account).
I do not tell you how to use Unix in this chapter, or for that matter in any chapter. For those of you who have seen previous editions of Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh, I removed that section from this chapter. Why? Several reasons. First, with PPP and SLIP accounts now commonplace, it's much less likely that you will have to suffer with a Unix shell account. Second, and I'll be honest here, I didn't feel that my treatment was sufficiently complete. There are many other books that cover the topic more completely, and I decided that I should stick to my strength -- Macintosh software. Third and finally, by reducing the page count of the book, I'm hopefully saving a few trees.
A book that has been recommended to me in regard to learning Unix is Dave Taylor's Teach Yourself UNIX in a Week (Sams Publishing, 1994, ISBN 0-672-30464-3), mostly because analogies both to DOS and to the Macintosh are included throughout. For those that know and dislike Unix, you owe it to yourself to check out The Unix-Haters Handbook by Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, and Steven Strassmann (IDG Books, 1994, ISBN 1-56884-203-1). Those already on the Internet with access to a Web browser (one wonders if they need much help with Unix at that point) might also check out the popular Internet Roadmap online class at:
http://www.brandonu.ca/~ennsnr/Resources/Roadmap/Welcome.html
Note: How can you tell if you have a shell account? Simple. If you use a terminal emulator like MicroPhone or ZTerm to connect, and once you're connected if you type Unix commands on a command line, then you're using a shell account.
Creating a program to act like a monkey and type the appropriate commands on the Unix command line is quite a bit more difficult than it might sound. The main problem is that a surprising number of variations of Unix exist, and even different sites running the same flavor of Unix may have their machines set up differently. The situation worsens when new versions of Unix programs appear with slightly different commands or slightly different results to old commands. It's a programmer's nightmare.
Thus, the few programs that can exist in this harsh environment have evolved some similar methods of coping. Almost without exception, they work by relying on the user to get them properly connected to the remote system, and from there they take over, usually connected directly to the appropriate server port for email or news or whatever. I say "whatever," but in fact, with one exception, the only two types of programs that work on Unix shell accounts are email programs and newsreaders. The exception is Homer, a client program for IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.
Actually, there is one other application, Pipeline's Internaut, that provides graphical Internet access without MacTCP or standard SLIP or PPP. Pipeline provides access to a number of Internet services, although not all the ones you might want to use, and requires a specific sort of account that isn't all that common.
However, the main solution to the problem of the Unix shell account is a program that has seriously shaken up the Internet world, The Internet Adapter, or TIA. Let's look at it first, and then at Eudora, which is another useful solution, before we spin through the remaining programs that can pretty up a Unix shell account.
On occasion in the past, I've seen postings in which people wonder why someone hasn't written a program to enable graphical programs that normally require a MacTCP-based connection to work with a normal shell account. There are a number of graphical Internet programs, such as Pipeline's Internaut (see chapter 12, "Commercial Services") on different platforms that use a proprietary protocol for talking to the host machine, which means that you can't use the standard Macintosh Internet programs such as Eudora, Anarchie, and MacWeb. Instead you must use the limited graphical client software provided by the same people who created the proprietary protocol.
I don't approve of this method of providing Internet access for two reasons. First, and most importantly, you're seriously limited in your choice of software for any particular task. With a full MacTCP-based connection, I can choose between Anarchie and Fetch, Netscape and MacWeb, Eudora and VersaTerm-Link, NewsWatcher and InterNews and Nuntius. In fact, I may even use multiple programs for the same thing -- I like and use both Anarchie and Fetch for different types of FTP tasks. You lose that flexibility when you're locked into a proprietary solution. Second, the Internet is a vast and fast-moving place, and new capabilities appear all the time, generally supported first, and often best, by freeware and shareware programmers. If you're locked into a specific proprietary program, there's no way you could use Cornell's Internet videoconferencing software, CU-SeeMe, play Stuart Cheshire's wonderful Bolo tank game, or check the weather with Chris Kidwell's MacWeather. All of those programs depend on the standard TCP/IP protocols that the Internet relies on, and these proprietary programs, useful as they may be, don't give you a standard TCP connection to the Internet.
Such is not the case with The Internet Adapter. TIA is a relatively small (about 250K) Unix program that you run on your normal Unix shell account, and it acts as a SLIP emulator. In other words, after you install TIA on your shell account, running TIA turns your shell account into a SLIP account for that session. Although a TIA emulated-SLIP account is not quite the same as a real SLIP account, TIA's SLIP emulation is completely standard in terms of working with MacTCP-based software on the Mac (or WinSock if you use a Windows machine). Version 1.1 of TIA, which should be out by the time you read this, will support PPP as well, which will be even better.
Just to repeat myself then, with the addition of a single Unix program which Cyberspace Development sells to individuals for $25 (although 1.1 will go up to $35 to help feed the TIA support staff) or sells to providers for more money, you can turn your plain old shell account into a whizzy SLIP account and use all of the MacTCP-based software I discuss in this book. I realize this all sounds a bit like a Ginsu knife commercial (did I mention how TIA can cut beer cans too?), but TIA has proven itself since its release in the summer of 1994 with over 10,000 singe user licenses sold and over 400 host and site licences. Cyberspace Development estimates that over 100,000 people now connect to the Internet via TIA.
Note: To use the graphical software I discuss later on in the book with a TIA account, you must still have MacTCP and a version of SLIP (or, once TIA 1.1 is out, PPP) installed. Don't worry about it because MacTCP, InterSLIP, and MacPPP come with this book.
TIA has become popular at sites that either aren't commercial or don't have much money to buy the expensive terminal servers that make real SLIP accounts easily possible. Since Cyberspace Development sells TIA to individuals, suddenly individual users have the choice of whether or not they get a SLIP account. Whereas in the past, if the machine didn't support SLIP, that was the end of the story. I heartily applaud putting power in the hands of the individual wherever possible; with TIA it's possible!
TIA created a huge fuss when it was first released, primarily on the part of Internet providers who felt that TIA endangered their business model, but for the most part all that fuss seems to have disappeared. A very few providers have banned TIA, but for the most part it has become a fact of life for Internet users previously limited to Unix shell accounts.
Note: The details that follow about how TIA turns your shell account into a SLIP account may not make much sense if you haven't looked through the chapters in part IV yet. Don't worry about it -- just skip the following section unless you're interested in how TIA works.
When you use TIA, you do not get your own IP number that uniquely identifies your Mac on the Internet while you're connected, as you do with a real SLIP account. Instead, TIA uses the IP number of the machine your shell account is on, and "redirects" traffic back to you (this is the magic part). If you must enter an IP number in some software, any number like
TIA's performance is reportedly good, faster than normal SLIP in fact, and about as fast as Compressed SLIP, or CSLIP. Future releases will support CSLIP and even PPP, and will reportedly increase speed by 10 to 20 percent. TIA doesn't create much of a load for the host machine, although slightly more than a real SLIP account, mostly because when you use SLIP, you're not usually running programs on the host machine, but are just using the network connection.
Installing TIA on your Unix shell account is not a completely trivial task, since you must install the proper version for the version of Unix running on your host machine. Cyberspace Development has ported TIA to a number of versions of Unix and more appear all the time (send email to tia-port-info@marketplace.com for a full list). If you don't know what version of Unix is running on your shell account, Cyberspace Development has a simple program that can find out the information for you. Current ports include those in table 14.1.
Essentially then, you retrieve the proper version of TIA via FTP, Gopher, or the Web, and then launch it. (For evaluation purposes, you can get a free version and test it for a while -- contact Cyberspace Development for an evaluation code.) Once TIA is running, you need to enable SLIP on your Mac, which means having MacTCP and InterSLIP properly configured.
In normal usage you use a script -- a gateway script if you're using InterSLIP -- for your SLIP program to log in to your shell account and then run TIA to start up the SLIP emulation. But it is possible to do it manually as well. In InterSLIP, you'd leave the Dialing and the Gateway menus set to Direct Connection, log in to your shell account with a terminal emulator, start TIA, and then quit the terminal emulator, making sure that the terminal emulator doesn't hang up the phone on quit. Luckily, others have created scripts that work with TIA, so you may not have to do all the work yourself. Look for this file or others with TIA in the name in the same directory:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/scr-interslip-tia-netcom.txt
You can order TIA on the Internet itself if you wish (and the Web forms at marketplace.com are reportedly the easiest method, even via Lynx, a character-based Web browser that runs on Unix shell accounts). Other mechanisms are available for those who dislike ordering on the nets. A company called SoftAware sells various versions of the TIA package along with installation help and consulting (useful for those of you who aren't familiar with Unix). If nothing else, I suspect working through SoftAware will be the easiest way for individuals to buy a complete package and be up and running quickly. Contact SoftAware at single-tia-sales@softaware.com or 310-305-0275. For those who wish to try setting up and configuring TIA alone, there are several help files available on the nets. Look for:
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/info/how-to-tia.txt
Note: The fact that you don't get your own IP number means that you cannot set your Mac up as an FTP server, for instance, because there's no IP number for an FTP client somewhere else to connect to.
Installing TIA
Table 14.1: Operating Systems Supported by TIA
Hardware Operating System
Sun Sparc Solaris 2.x
Sun Sparc SunOS 4.1.x
Sun 3 SunOS 4.1.x
386/486 BSDI 1.0
386/486 BSDI 1.1
386/486 SCO
386/486 Linux
DEC MIPS ULTRIX versions 4.3a (also works with 4.2, 4.4)
DEC ALPHA OSF/1 2.0 (also works with 3.0)
IBM RS6000 AIX 3.2
SGI IRIX 4.0 (also works with 5.2)
HP HP-UX 9.0 (also works with 7.x)
Note: Actually, unlike most shareware, for which you download the program first, then register, TIA is generally easier to register first, then download (because of how the license codes work). Cyberspace Development recommends getting an evaluation license code from marketplace.com (via email or the Web -- details following). The code comes with complete instructions for obtaining the proper version of TIA for your flavor of Unix from marketplace.com via FTP.