Three seemingly unrelated interests have begun to converge for me over the last year or two: 1. I subscribed to this list, with an interest in keeping some of my old hardware up and running. 2. I finally got a mobile phone. 3. I bought a Palm organizer. Items 2 and 3 really converged last week when I upgraded to an Internet-ready phone. The phone itself has a mini-browser (which is only useful for finding an alternate connecting flight when stranded on the runway), but the Palm (a 20MHz unit with 8MB RAM -- recently replacing a 16MHz 2MB unit) offers full-blown browsing and interactive capabilities. When using the phone as a wireless modem, it works quite well. So well, I've spent a lot of time playing with all the new capabilities out there. And I've realized that Interest 1 might fit into the whole equation as well. A number of proxy web solutions have become available which assist resource-limited systems such as phones and PDAs by making web queries on behalf of the device, stripping or otherwise compressing graphics, then sending the results on. The result is that a 2 or 8MB device can use the web with pretty good results. Even further along the road to efficiency are the WAP sites designed for phones with suitable browsers. WAP browsers can be found for Windows and Palm (and presumably others). They're fine for reading news and other text-centric tasks. The ultimate in terms of light footprint are Palm's PQA (Palm Query App) -- possibly superceded by WAP, but still viable. So I have to wonder if anyone's considered taking/adapting a similar approach for DOS machines? A WAP browser would allow one to easily read news, and send/receive e-mail. A proxy setup would allow even machines with minimalist graphics capabilities to browse the "modern" Internet without requiring an overblown client. Better yet, these are well-established standards that are likely to be around for a bit. Open-source clients are available (I think) for both, and the list of Palm and WAP-friendly sites grows daily. Anyhow, just some quick thoughts on the matter. I don't have anything solid in mind right now, and I've long since lost track of my DOS development tools. - Bob To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
