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Who wants to be a billionaire?

Here's the idea - an inexpensive internet service similar to the free Maryland Sailor system, but with its weaknesses eliminated. This would be very attractive to people for whom the computer is not an entertainment center, but a tool mainly for word-processing, email, and mining the web for information. I'm guessing that's still a lot of people - you might get rich.

What is the Maryland Sailor system?

Until recently (writing in June 2002), I used the Maryland Sailor system almost exclusively for my internet access. You dial into the system using an old-fashioned communications program (such as Telix) and get the text-only Lynx browser. This may sound laughably prehistoric, but it has lots of advantages:

1. You can use any old computer - pre-Pentium, pre-Windows, pre-anything... no need to join the ratrace of bigger, faster, and more complicated computers every 18 months.

2. Blazing speed, even with the piece-o-junk computer described above.

3. Simple, neat, easy-to-read, 80-characters-per-line screen.

4. A simple search mechanism for text within a web page which is pure heaven compared to the torture Windows and modern browsers put you through.

5. Quick and easy download of web pages or email messages using the screen capture mode of your communications program. Again, far easier than what Windows and modern browsers put you through.

6. No worry of viruses on your own machine, since all you get are text characters for your screen.

7. No mouse; no Windows, even!

8. Cheap! (Maryland Sailor is free, actually.)

The Sailor/Lynx system is so incredibly fast, I suppose, partly because it is text-only, but mainly because your personal computer is just a dumb terminal into a real computer. Even with an old 286 and a phone line and a 9600 baud modem, you can leave your friends using state of the art equipment and connections in the dust. This is not an exaggeration. Another advantage of older computers is that you can power up, dial up, and be on the web in seconds - try that with a "state-of-the-art" machine!

The problem with Sailor/Lynx is that things are always changing; there's newer HTML it can't handle, and there are more and more websites that won't let you in. What the reasons for the latter are, I'm not sure. It seems that Sailor/Lynx can't access secure, "HTTPS" sites, but I also suspect that some servers slam the door on browsers they perceive to be text-only. In any case, you can no longer get into such major sites as Yahoo! and Hotmail from the Maryland Sailor system. Phooey.

Other weaknesses include the handling of frames (Lynx handles frames, but it could do better); the handling of tables (Lynx butchers tables); the handling of a drop-down box of links (Lynx shows the link you selected, but doesn't take you there); and the handling of images.

These problems are all fixable. For instance, let's talk images. Even if you're not someone like me who wants to tear his eyeballs out when forced to work with a graphical browser, you'll find the web looks much nicer text-only. Admittedly, there are times when you do need to see a picture - on eBay, for example. Using Lynx, you can download an image and fire it up in an image viewer. Admittedly, that's too much work. What I'm envisioning here is not a text-only browser, but a text-first browser. This text-first browser will have a built-in image viewer. The user simply clicks on a link to see an image. (I say "click" even though it's all done from the keyboard.) The user may request a reduced, postage-stamp sized image if he doesn't want to wait for the full 100-kilobyte image to transfer.

Another problem is that web pages now often use an image to display words, such as buttons for "Go" or "Continue". No problem - this service will notice when a link has no associated text and will scan the image for text characters and shoot them over the line to the user.

Even though the service I'm describing will make using web-based mail services even easier, I sure would like the service to come with a good ol' menu-driven freenet-type mail service. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it. Just trust me, it's a million times faster and simpler than what Hotmail, Yahoo!, Mail.com, etc. put you through.

I'll leave it to the future billionaires who develop this service to make it as user-friendly as possible and keep it constantly updated to handle whatever the web has to throw at it. I hope this isn't a bad assumption, but I figure if Maryland can provide such a service for free, it should cost a lot less than full-blown internet service. If so, that would be further enticement to many people who currently pay for full-blown internet service. All they need to get used to is, if they want an image, movie, sound, or obnoxious flashing ad, they have to click for it. And when a sizable fraction of web-users switch over to this "text-first" browsing, web page designers would necessarily begin to take that into account. I don't kid myself that we could ever return to a state of blessed simplicity, but the web might become a much less hideous thing to look at.

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