stikcAB USERS Resource part 1

(Download files from stikcAB USERS Resource part 2)

STiK is an easy-to-install TCP/IP stack for TOS based computers. It combines with several tools to offer things like off-line e-mail reading, file transfers, and web browsing.

The easiest way to access the Internet using a TOS based machine is to get the lovely World Wide Web package now available. It contains STiK (the tcp/ip stack), Antmail (an off-line e-mail reader), MG-ftp (an ftp-based file transfer tool), CAB (a world wide web browser), Telnet (for establishing those old-fashioned connections when you need to), and several other tools. It also has a set-up utility to automate the installation process.

Until we get the YAC ftp site straightened out a bit, you can download (CAB friendly) the latest versions of the web package and its components from our temporary Atari Internet Software site (please bookmark one of the YAC pages, such as the one you are currently reading, rather than the temporary Atari Internet Software page for future use, as we plan to move these files to the DCN server and access them from this page in the future). Atari Internet Software (aka stikcAB USERS Resource part 2).

If you are a subscriber of The Davis Community Network, you can use your ftp program to visit our anonymous FTP site to get (currently an older version of) this program (WWW116.ZIP).

Some technical background

For years, Atari users accessed the Internet the way most personal computer owners did, using a telecommunications program to run a "telnet session" (a virtual window onto another machine, in this case usually a UNIX based server). This meant that the personal computer wasn't itself actually on the Internet, but it had access to utilities, and thereby files, on a computer that was. Popular telecommunications programs included Flash, STalker, STorm, ConNect, Freeze Dried Term, and others.

A few years ago, Internet administrators started to encourage users to move to new technology that would shift the burden of work away from the server and to the client computer, the personal computer. To this end, new dial-up versions of the Internet's communications protocol (called TCP/IP, which stands for Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) were developed. The two most commonly used implementations of this are called SLIP (Simple Little Internet Protocol) and PPP (Point-to-Point Protocol). With a SLIP or PPP connection, your personal computer will temporarily be a part of the Internet. This allows you to store your e-mail files on your own machine and read them with a text editor running on your machine (if you have a program that supports the SMTP [Simple Mail Transport Protocol] layer that runs on top of TCP/IP), or to read news (NNTP), or to transfer file (FTP), etc. This new technology opened the way to protocols that were more intensive, including a new protocol (HTTP or Hyper Text Transport Protocol) that distributes hypertext documents (documents linked to each other by key words or images). The international tangle of hypertext documents has come to be known as the World Wide Web.

Why all the history?

I just thought it would be helpful because it will explain the difference between the word "Internet" and the phrase "World Wide Web." What is often called the "Atari World Wide Web package" is actually an Internet connectivity package. It has tools to explore many parts of the Internet, not just the World Wide Web.

It is also important to note that the various tools, which are being updated all the time, are written by many different people, so the components don't all get updated at the same time. It might be possible to find a newer version of one part of the package long before an update to the whole package is created. For this reason, we are supplying links to places where you can commonly find recent updates to portions of the package:

Mail additions/corrections to Eric Hays at elhays@ucdavis.edu.
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