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Table of Contents
Web Notes --
Curious Technology -- Articles --If you are looking for ways to use the Web effectively, you need the confidence and knowledge that can only come from hands-on experience. Go to www.webworkzone.com/bootcamp This site is intended to help you get the experience you need and to make sense of it. Here I'll be posting and pointing to articles and book chapters intended to help you better understand the bizarre Internet business environment and to recognize new opportunities. This site is still under construction. I hope to have it fully populated by the end of October. But please feel free to come and read or post at any time. You can read anything as an anonymous visitor, but to post, you need to register and/or login. Please use this space to share your experiences and post your reactions, questions, and suggestions. If you have questions about this new site of mine, you can reach me by email at seltzer@samizdat.com
If you have a Web site, check your logs for visits from 204.123.28.10. That's Mercator, the crawler for the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), and chances are that it's visiting every page at your site about twice a month. The Internet Archive has been quietly recording a fairly large chunk of the Web since 1996. They provide free access to the collection for researchers, historians, and scholars. While access is "free," it isn't easy. You need to submit a research proposal and have it okayed, and you also need UNIX programming skills to get to the content. But they claim to have over a billion Web pages on file, and their current users include the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, Xerox PARC, IBM, AT&T, NEC, and the Federal Government Information Clearinghouse.
Go to www.javapuzzlecards.com Drag one of the standard pictures to the center of the screen. Click on the letter icon under "Tools" in the right column, then click anywhere on the picture and start typing a message. Under "Pieces" use the drop down menu to select "few", "some", "more", or "insane". Click "Create" and see how many pieces that winds up. If you change your mind, click "Undo" and try again. When you like what you see, "Send Puzzle" and enter your own email address. A minute or so later, you should receive an email message with the URL of your puzzle. Go there and try it out. You'll see the pieces randomly scattered. You click and drag to move the pieces and put them together. It's very slick and very addictive. Lots of fun. Then go back to the Javapuzzlecards site and instead of the standard pictures, click "Import Image" and upload a digital photo of your own and make a puzzle of that, and this time send it friends. Or go to AltaVista, www.altavista.com. In the left column under "Multimedia", click on Images, and do a search for your favorite cartoon character or celebrity; save the image you like best; then return to the puzzle site, upload that image, and make a puzzle of that for your own pleasure or for friends. This app is brand new. It's still in beta mode. You could use it for sending puzzle greetings to friends, or as part of a marketing campaign, or with young kids for educational purposes. To talk about the possibilities, please join us for a chat session on Thursday, Oct. 19, from noon to 1 PM Eastern Time (GMT -4). Go to www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html to get to the chat room.
Free software available from www.cottagemicro.com/ebooks makes it easy to create audio books for the Web -- books that include text, graphics, and narration. For an example of how the end product looks and feels, check my book The Lizard of Oz at www.samizdat.com/liz To hear the narration, you'll need to connect using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and you'll need the RealPlayer from www.real.com (the free version works fine, and you can get good quality with a connection as slow as a 28K modem).
It's amazing how dependent we've become on Microsoft Office software. Today "Microsoft Word" is almost synonymous with "word processor." Excel is almost synonymous with "spread sheet." And if you need to put together a presentation, everybody thinks "PowerPoint."
I, for one, am tired of seeing the same old PointPoint clipart again and again. I'm tired of presentations that proceed linearly -- starting at slide number one and going through slide after slide to the last one. I'm tired of presentations that take up megabytes and sometimes tens of megabytes of disk space, that clog my email inbox, and that are too big to fit on a floppy, so I wind up carting my entire laptop.
Well, there is a simple alternative to PowerPoint, and ironically, Microsoft Word makes it easy for anyone to do. The alternative is Internet-style presentations.
I've been doing this since 1994, when I was evangelizing about Internet opportunities inside DEC Equipment. Back then, making a Web page -- even one that consisted of just plain text -- was a challenge. There were no WYSIWYG Web authoring tools. Every line, every carriage return had to be marked up by hand in HTML. And you needed to find someone with a server on the Web and beg for permission to put your stuff there -- Web hosting as a regular service simply didn't exist.
Today, though few folks realize it, the latest versions of Word (for Office 98 and 2000) come with HTML authoring built in. You can create a document the way you normally do and then save it as an HTML document with .htm as the file extension. Then you get a new toolbar that makes it easy for you to add hyperlinks, and other Internet-style features to your page.
A presentation is nothing more than a sequence of short HTML pages -- with the text of each page visible on a single screen and all the pages linked together. Give the top line a consistent headline style, and have the text another, smaller headline style -- so it's plenty big enough to read. And keep your text short and crisp -- single lines, if possible, separated with carriage returns. Throw in some horizontal lines for effect.
If you have illustrations that actually convey useful information (not just clip art), then link from the text to the image file; and if when delivering the presentation, you decide to show a picture, just click on that link.
If at various points in your talk, you might want to branch off and go into greater detail on one or more points, then make a link from the related text to that other sequence of slides, and from the last one, link back to that starting point.
At the bottom of each page, have a link for the next page, and also a link to an index page that has brief description of and links to every page in the presentation. That way, based on audience reaction, you can change directions -- go straight to a side sequence, or skip ahead quickly.
If your talk deals with Internet-related matters and if you are going to have a live Internet connection when you make the presentation, then link directly from your text to the examples on the Web you'd like to show. If you know you will not have a live connection, then do screen captures of the example pages, using a program like PaintShop Pro, and link to those images.
Save all the slides and images for a given presentation alone in the same directory. Name all the files with .htm as the file extension. Then when you link from one of these files to another, don't use the complete URL as it would be on the Internet (like http://www.mysite.com/presentation/title.htm). Rather just use the file name (like title.htm). That's called using "relative" links. When the address is incomplete -- not specifying the path to where the file is found -- your browser looks for the file in the current directory, whether that happens to be on your hard drive or on the Web.
Hence, with all the files for a given presentation in the same directory on your PC, as you are doing the writing in Word, you can click on the links you have created, and the pages you have linked to will open up as new Word pages, and the images will appear as well. You can go through your entire presentation -- including all the branching paths -- all in Word, thereby making sure that the links work the way you think they should, and making necessary corrections immediately. And when you open any of these files with your browser, the links will work. And if you email your presentation to a friend or give it to him on a floppy disk, all he'll need to do is open the first slide in his browser and all the links will work. And when you upload the presentation to the Web, all the links will work.
When you are done, you not only have a very useful presentation, but also have gained experience and insight into how to create simple Web pages and link them together in a Web site.
You can leave your pages on your hard drive and deliver your presentation locally, with no Internet connection. Or you can deliver it from your hard drive with a live connection, which means you will sometimes be pulling images or pages from the Web. Or you can upload your presentation to the Web -- perhaps to free Web space at a site like NBCi (which used to be called Xoom, and which now offers unlimited Web space for free). In that case, you could deliver your presentation from any machine (whether PC or Mac or UNIX or Linux) anywhere in the world. Or you could simply point colleagues to the URL of the first slide, and they could go through it in their office without having to use email or download anything. You could even have a concall with everybody connecting to the same Web-based presentation and clicking through it together, even though you are thousands of miles apart.
Give it a try. Your presentations will probably wind up taking less than a tenth the disk space of a comparable PowerPoint presentation. A three-hour presentation will probably fit on a single floppy disk, with lots of room to spare. And all anyone needs to see your presentation is a browser, any browser. You don't need to worry about everybody having the same version of PowerPoint.
And your presentations can be delightfully non-linear, with lots of branching paths, and alternate examples, and the opportunity to digress and go into detail, when appropriate, by following links on Web pages that you selected as examples.
It's easy. It's quick. I'm amazed that no company has gone to the little bit of effort it would take to make this even easier and quicker, and to give the final product a slick professional look. If you come across any tool like that, please let me know.
A friend who just got a new job wrote to me saying, "My first project is to create order out of the mess they are using as an Internet. Could you kindly share your experience with me? What's your advice regarding Web usability and navigation?"
First keep in mind that you have two separate and not always compatible goals:
Forget about Meta Tags -- they are worthless. Focusing on Meta Tags would probably lead to your missing the most important factor: the actual text content of your pages.
Each of your mirror/search engine pages should have links to the home page of your main site, recommending that users go that way to get the optimal experience. There's no need for links from there back to the search engine pages.
Every page of yours should have some text that makes the context clear (what is this site? what's its purpose?) and links for easy navigation within the site (including Help and the site map). Presume that each and every page is a potential entry point for visitors and make sure they won't be confused when they arrive.
Create a "site map" page that in plain static HTML has a hyperlinked list of all pages at your site, and include a link to that site map on every one of your pages. That is the page that you should point search engines to. That makes it easy for crawlers to find all your pages.
Keep your Web addresses simple -- the fewer the levels of directories the better. Search engines like AltaVista presume that the higher a page is in the directory hierarchy, the more important it is; and some will simply halt at about the third or fourth directory level.
Also keep in mind that search engines are inclined to give more value to large pages as opposed to small ones. So don't divide long articles into a series of linked short pages each of which is no bigger than a screen or two. The longer the better (up to about 64K of text). If corporate design rules or someone's notion of the ideal user experience forces you to design that way, then create mirror pages where the full content is all together. That's not only good for search engines, it also makes it far easier for visitors to print your content.
Avoid search engine optimization and submission services. Submit yourself to AltaVista, Excite, Hotbot, Lycos, Google, Fastsearch, and others you know of and like -- using your site map page, not your home page. Also, be sure to submit to the Open Directory and Yahoo. Submit to the LookSmart directory, too, if you are willing to spend a couple hundred dollars.
For optimum results and fast indexing service at AltaVista, you should submit each and every page individually, whenever you create a new page and whenever you make a significant change to a page. You pages should then appear in the AltaVista index within a few days, or a week or two at worst, while some of the other search engines will take a month or two, or even three months.
Do not change the URL of existing pages. Some companies automatically move aged content to an archive area where it has a new URL. Don't . That screws up both search engines and also bookmarks and links that friends may have created to your pages.
Also, never delete a Web page that contains significant content. If the information is old or the product is discontinued, add text at the beginning that explains the situation and links visitors to the latest and greatest related information and newer products.
For details on related matters, please check the latest version of my search engine tutorial, starting at www.samizdat.com/script/title.htm Also look at the articles at: www.samizdat.com/belongs.html, /report.html, /general.html, /soc5.html, /soc6.html, /soc7.html, and /fly.html
If these concepts are foreign to the marketing and corporate folks who set the rules for what you do and how you must do it, and they need someone to wake them up, then maybe your company would be a good prospect for my consulting :-) For details on what I do and what I charge, check www.samizdat.com/consult.html
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I've been a text-bigot for years. Not that I don't enjoy seeing a neat picture or hearing great sound or watching a well-designed videoclip on the Web. But that with text I was in control, and with everything else I was just another passive consumer. Text I could easily create and post on free Web space and I could count on people finding my pages without me having to spend money on advertising because search engines would index my text, and many people navigate the Web by way of search engines. Multimedia was beyond my creative reach. Besides, I told myself, the bandwidth isn't there yet. Even with DSL and cable modem speeds, video is still a bit of a joke.
To me the difference between the text-based Web and the multimedia Web was like the difference between the days of the Atari 800 and Commodore 64 and the days of Nintendo and Sega, back in the 1980s. With the Atari 800 and Commodore 64, you could buy cartridges or games on floppy, but you had a keyboard, and you also could write your own games in BASIC or even Assembly language and type in the code for games from magazine articles. And the games you wrote, you could share with friends or even sell to magazines. Then along came the Nintendo Entertainment System, followed by Sega Genesis, and the game play and graphics were so far superior that older systems were simply blown away. And these new systems were totally passive -- there was no keyboard; the only games you could play were the ones you bought as cartridges.
So I dreaded the coming of truly high-speed Internet and the inevitable onrush on prepackaged, high-production cost multimedia content, that little guys, like me, couldn't hope to compete with.
Then a year ago, I got a DEC camera -- a Sony Mavica, because it stores its images on plain ordinary floppies, making it very inexpensive and easy to store files and move them to my PC. I got it primarily because I wanted to sell at online auctions, and photos were essential to that. But I found myself taking the camera along on family trips and taking pictures galore. It was easy to view them on my PC, and since my PC was relatively recent I had a few gigabytes of storage space to spare, so it was no big deal transferring everything from the floppies to the hard drive. I even put a few on the Web, but there I had to be very selective, because of the limitations of disk space.
The weekend I put a multimedia book on the Web -- nearly 20 Megabytes for a single book. Before that, my entire Web site, which gets about 1200 to 1400 unique users a day, took up less than 15 Megabytes. So why was I suddenly being so wasteful? What's going on?
What I hadn't realized, but should have, is that disk space on the Web, not bandwidth was the main barrier to the proliferation of creative do-it-yourself multimedia. Quality streaming audio has been available from RealAudio, working well even with a 28K modem, for several years. And Real.com makes available for free the RealProducer software you need for creating audio and video files. That software had been available for quite some time, but I had never paid attention, because there was no way I could store files that size on the Web. Sure, I could do it just for my own consumption, taking advantage of those extra gigabytes on the hard drive on my PC, but Web space was still precious.
Now, all of a sudden, disk space on the Web is free; and that makes an enormous difference, unleashing my creative instincts, and probably the instincts of many others as well.
A couple years ago, free Web-hosting sites like Xoom, Geocities, and Tripod typically made available 10 Megabytes. Now they've all gone up considerably in their limits, and at least one NBCi www.nbci.com (which bought Xoom) offers unlimited disk space for free.
So I took The Lizard of Oz, a fantasy that I had self-published as a paperback back in the 1970s, and recorded it, chapter by chapter using the microphone on my PC and the RealProducer software. Then I used Bob Zwick's free eBookIt software (www.cottagemicro.com/ebooks). I wound up with an online edition of my book that includes the text and illustrations very slickly and readably presented, and with a mini RealPlayer control panel right on the page, so you can play the narration. To use it, you need to use Microsoft's Internet Explorer and you need the RealPlayer, but the free version will do just fine, and it works great. Check it out at www.samizdat.com/liz
This means that anybody can now make attractive and useful audio books. A high school class or even an elementary school class could, with the equipment and Internet connection they already have, make online editions of the classics -- capturing the text from the Gutenberg Project, recording the narration themselves, and posting the massive files in free Web space. They could do the same thing with their own writing as well. And anyone, anywhere in the world, with an ordinary modem-based connection to the Internet could enjoy these creations.
In other words, a revolution has happened, quietly. And it didn't happen because of some great new technological advance or some massive increase in bandwidth. Rather with the decreasing cost of high-capacity hard drives, someone made the business decision to offer unlimited disk space on the Web for free, and that has made all the difference.
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AltaVista recently increased the range of language pairs it handles with its free automatic translation service, and at the same time made the service far easier to use. You can connect to this service by going to babelfish.altavista.com
Now you can translate from Russian to English (in addition to from Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese to English), and you can also go from French to German and German to French.
At the same time they added a "world keyboard". Just click on the keyboard icon, and a virtual keyboard appears in a Java window and you get a new, associated translation form. The keyboard has a dropdown menu of language choices: world (English characters plus a few special characters and accented letters used in other European languages), English (useful for people whose keyboard are set already in non-English languages), French (for translating French to English and French to German), German (for German to English and German to French), Spanish (for Spanish to English), Italian (for Italian to English), Portuguese (for Portugese to English), and Russian (for Russian to English). When you select a language, the characters on the keyboard change accordingly. Then you can type in the translation box by clicking on the keys of the virtual keyboard or by hitting the equivalent keys on your real keyboard; either way the charcter you see in the translation box will be a character from the language you have chosen.
This innovation makes it much easier to enter foreign text for translation. In the past, you had to have your PC's keyboard set to enter characters from that language, or had to cut and paste into the translation box text that already had the appropriate non-English characters, or you had to enter English "equivalents" of foreign characters, which sometimes led to ambiguity or confusion.
Unfortunately, the words that you type with the virtual keyboard are only of use in that search box. This is a Java application which makes it impossible to copy and paste the text from the box to anywhere else. (This is unlike the main Babel translation page, where you can copy text -- complete with accents and non-English characters from the results box to any other document on your PC.)
In addition, the translation boxes on the main Babelfish page are now much clearer and easier to use. There is a small box at the bottom where you can enter a URL, to see the translation of the first 5K (about 800 words or two doublespaced typed pages) of any Web page. Above that is a large box in which you can type or paste any text that you want translated.
When you request a translation, a new window opens with the results box on top. Directly below that is a button labelled "Search the Web with these results." That setup makes it easy for you to translate a word or phrase, and then search the Web for those foreign words. For instance, you might be interested in mentions of cockroaches in Spanish language Web pages.You enter "cockroach", get the Spanish world "cucaracha", click on Search the Web, and get 1600 matching pages.
When you see the list of search results, each item then has an associated "Translate" link. Click on that, on you see the translation of the target page (using the translation pair you original chose -- in this case Spanish to English), with all the graphics and page layout just as it was in the original. You also see at the top of the screen the choices: World Home and View Original Language. Click on View Original Language and a second browser window opens up, so you can see the original page and the translated page side by side for comparison.
Click on World Home, and you arrive at a page where all of AltaVista's language and country-specific features are readily available to you. There's a regular simple search box, with its pull-down menu of languages you'd like to search in (a much wider selection that the languages available for translation, including Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish).
You also see a selection of country-specific AltaVista search sites, where the search site itself is written in the local anguage, the content is tailored for the needs of a local audience, and the server is located in the target country for fast esponse time -- Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, and United Kingdom. And, of course, you see the Babelfish translation boxes, with the choice of World Keyboard.
IBG reported to Bill Strecker, the company's technology guru, and had its headquarters in the same building in Littleton, Mass., as Sam Fuller's Research Group. Researchers at DEC's labs in Palo Alto, CA, and Cambridge, MA had played important pioneering roles in the development of the Internet, long before the Web. Back in 1977, when ARPAnet consisted of just 60 nodes, DEC was the first computer or networking company to connect. In 1985, DEC became the first computer company to register an Internet domain and also created the first corporate Internet mail gateway, this gives every email user in DEC full access to the Internet. By 1986, they had created the first Internet "firewall," protection against attacks by hackers. When Web browsers finally became available for PCs, in October, 1993, Russ Jones (who later became one of the first members of IBG) posted the company's product literature on the Web, thereby creating the first commercial Web site from a Fortune 500 company. By January 1994, DEC's researchers had put the City of Palo Alto and the Future Fantasy Bookstore on the Web, as early experiments of how the Web could be used by local government and small businesses. That same month, Richard Seltzer and Berthold Langer (both future IBG members) created a brief video tape "A Glimpse of the Future" which helped alert not just DEC internal audiences, but the industry as well, of the business potential of the Internet. Thousands of copies of that tape were distributed by NCSA (the folks who had developed Mosaic, the first popular Web browser) and computer companies around the world. For that video, they received the first Internet Marketing Award at Internet World in May 1994. (The complete DEC Internet Timeline, up to 1997, is still available on the Web at www.digital.com/info/misc/digint/timeline.html).
For at least a year before IBG was formed, Brian Reid, head of DEC's Western Research Lab, had repeatedly and eloquently stressed the importance of the Internet to DEC's survival and the fact that the time was right and resources available for DEC to become THE Internet company. In February 1994, Brian, together with three other Internet advocates from DEC -- Alan Kotok (senior consulting engineer, later IBG, and now associate director of the World Wide Web Consortium), Steve Fink (marketing, later IBG), and Gail Grant (from Palo Alto) -- visited Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web) in Geneva to learn about CERN's plans for the Web so they could better assess the Web's business potential.
In his book, Weaving the Web : The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee describes this meeting as a turning point:
"Alan had been pushing DEC in the direction of the Web ever since he had been shown a Web browser, and management had asked Steve to put together a team to assess the future of the Internet for DEC. Steve explained that they would be largely redesigning DEC as a result of the Web. While they saw this as a huge opportunity, they were concerned about where the Web was headed, worried that the Web was perhaps defined by nothing more than specifications stored on some disk sitting around somewhere at CERN. they wanted to know what CERN's attitude was about the future path of the Web, and whether they could rest assured that it would remain stable yet evolve.
"I asked them what their requirements were, what they felt was important. They felt strongly that there should be a neutral body acting as convener. They were not interested in taking over the Web, or having some proprietary control of it. But they really wanted a body of oversight to which they could become attached. They wondered if CERN would do this.
"For me this was a listening meeting. It was important input into the decision about what to do next." (p. 78)
In May, a virtual team led by Gail Grant put together a DEC exhibit at Internet World in San Jose. In August, Richard Seltzer wrote an Internet speech for delivery by Governor Weld of Massachusetts and Governor Cambell of South Carolina at the National Governors' Conference in Boston, and Jim Gettys (from the Cambridge Research Labs) set up a live demo that was the first time that most of these governors had seen the Internet. And that same month, Sirrka Jarvenpaa, a visiting professor at the Harvard Business School, began interviewing for a case study "Digital Equipment Corporation: The Internet Company", which she and co-author Blake Ives published in October and which was used by dozens of business schools in courses about Internet business for several years to come. And that same month as well, after much discussion, the Internet Business Group was formed, with Rose Ann Giordano as vice president.
In the interim, a few people who had been strong Internet advocates and innovators and who were impatient to get started left the company to pursue other opportunities. For instance, Win Treese and Andy Payne from the Cambridge Research Labs, and Gail Mann from the labs in Palo Alto left for Open Market. And NT marketing guru Ed Cuoco left for Vermeer, which later became Microsoft's FrontPage (see High Stakes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson).
From the beginning, IBG acted as the core guiding force behind a much larger virtual team, depending on Internet enthusiasts and experts throughout the company. But the company was in serious trouble, laying off many people and reorganizing repeatedly as it tried to adjust to a changing marketplace. Hence, one of the first tasks for IBG was to do what it could to save those virtual team members from being laid off by groups that didn't understand their importance to the future of the company. So over time, within the limits of headcount budgets and periodic transfer/hiring freezes, a number of virtual players became IBG employees.
The virtual team also included many "partners" -- small startups, who turned to DEC for advice and support, at a time when no one was making money on the Internet and it was not yet clear that anyone would or how. One of the first of these partners was Netscape (originally called "Mosaic Communications), with DEC becoming their first OEM in November 1994, within a month of the launch of their first browser. Developing relationships with these new companies often presented political challenges, having to deal with pre-existing DEC programs and partners and balance close, long-standing relationships with companies like Microsoft.
Internet technology and business was developing at such a pace that the playing field and the messages changed significantly about once every six months. And marketing efforts were punctuated by major trade shows -- particularly, Internet World in the spring and fall -- through 1995 and 1996.
IBG's goal was to move quickly like a startup, and have a product out the door within six months, packaging third party software with Alpha hardware. The engineering efforts started in "virtual mode", with the company's first packaged Web server system (a turnkey combination of hardware and software) developed under the direction of the Education Group and then taken over and marketed and further developed by IBG. But IBG soon assembled its own small engineering team which guided and developed such pioneering products as WebForum (now SiteScape Forum, probably the first commercial product designed for threaded discussion on the Web), and a family of security products, including firewalls and a "tunnel" (the first commercially available Virtual Private Network [VPN] product). And the research labs, inspired by Brian Reid's leadership, continued to generate innovative technology and showcase projects, the most successful of which was AltaVista (brainchild of Louis Monier, Mike Burrows, and Paul Flaherty), publicly launched as a research project in December 1995. (In 1996, Richard Seltzer from IBG wrote the book The AltaVista Search Revolution, which was published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill).
Meanwhile, the company went through one reorganization after another, and the role and reporting relationship of IBG was redefined again and again. In 1996, IBG spun off the AltaVista Group, and the software engineering team moved over.
As IBG succeeded, the Internet became increasingly important to the company's business, eventually pervading all of its activities. Late in 1996, the group moved to Marlboro, Mass., and by the end of 1997, it had been dissolved, with many team members going on to run Internet-related activities in other organizations throughout the company. In 1998, just as DEC's business was turning around, the company was sold to Compaq, and many former IBG members left, going on to play important roles in dozens of companies throughout the industry.
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Adding dozens of new titles every month, Gutenberg has already nearly 3000 etexts available for free over the Internet. These include classic works of literature and history, as well as out-of-print and little-known works by great authors. If you can, connect by ftp, rather than the Web, to get the most recent ones. Here's a list of those recently added, alphabetized by author. The file name is useful for fetching the text from the ftp site. Unless otherwise noted, the directory is the one for 2001. Text for earlier years are corrected editions. Many of these texts are available now or will be soon on diskette from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK for those who cannot get them themselves. For the current catalog, check http://www.samizdat.com/catalog.html.
William Harrison Ainsworth -- Windsor Castle (wndsr10.txt)
E. A. Allen -- The Prehistoric World (prehw10.txt)
Robert Browning -- A Blot In The 'Scutcheon (abits10.txt)
Solon J. Buck -- The Agrarian Crusade (agrcr10.txt)
Dante -- Inferno (trans. by Longfellow) (1997, 1ddcl10.txt)
Charles Darwin -- Animals and Plants under Domestication (vol 1 = 1vapd10.txt, vol 2 = 2vapd10.txt)
Arthur Conan Doyle --
Epictetus -- The Golden Sayings (1997, epict10.txt)
J. Henri Fabre -- J. Henri Fabre (msnbs10.txt)
Walter Lynwood Fleming -- The Sequel of Appomattox (sqpm10.txt)
E. M. Forster -- Howards End, by E. M. Forster (hoend10.txt)
John Galsworth --
Maxim Gorky -- Creatures That Once Were Men (1998, crmen11a.txt)
H. Rider Haggard --
Herman Hesse -- Siddhartha (with accents = 8sidd10.txt without accents = 7sidd10.txt)
Franklin Hichborn -- California's 1909 Legislature (cal0910.txt)
Fergus Hume -- The Green Mummy (gmmmy10.txt)
Thomas Henry Huxley --
Flavius Josephus --
William Morris -- The House of the Wolfings (hswlf10.txt)
Melville Davisson Post -- The Sleuth of St. James Street (sluth10.txt)
Howard Pyle -- Otto of the Silver Hand (ottos10.txt)
Roget's Thesaurus (1991, roget15a.txt)
Henryk Sienkiewicz -- Quo Vadis, The Time of Nero (quvds10.txt)
James Stephens -- Irish Fairy Tales (rshft10.txt)
William Makepeace Thackeray --
Holland Thompson -- The Age of Invention (nvent10.txt)
Anthony Trollope -- Framley Parsonage (frmly10.txt)
Mark Twain --
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