January 1999 Meeting Report
by Howard L. Bonar
Secretary, Alaska Computer Society

The January 1999 meeting of the Alaska Computer Society was held at the Anchorage Museum of Natural History starting at 7:00 pm.

Questions and Answers

The first question of the evening was how to export a short list of the E-mail addresses in Netscape. A member wanted to send the list to a friend and didn't want to have to re-type them. The suggestion was to create a message with all of the names desired selected as recipients. Instead of sending it, save the message as a draft. From the draft box then, you can forward the message to only one person or copy the addresses into a word processing file. The Netscape address book can be exported to a file but it contains all of the field names for each entry. Also, some of the information is encoded and is not readable. The address book data base is in a special format that is not easily read. The list of names only is in the file address.htm.

Another member is having troubles with controlling the Start-up configuration of Windows 98. Apparently, some software is trying to take over control of the desk top.

Main Meeting

President Gene White introduced the board members, SIG (Special Interest Group) leaders and volunteers present.

Howard Bonar reported on the Anchorage Library's new program to select an information data base provider for the coming year. The state has funded it for one year and the State Library people must select one vendor from the six being tested. Please see the article elsewhere in this issue for more information.

Ed Caldwell reported that the membership cards were available at the sign-in table. Cathy Palmateer volunteered to handle passing them out. Her help was much appreciated. The membership cards will not be mailed out. You must come to the meeting to get yours. Now that the cards are available, members can start taking advantage of the discounts being offered. Alaska Computer Brokers is offering special pricing and Barnes & Noble is presently offering discounts. We will be actively soliciting other vendors to follow their example.

Bronwyn Hillman reported on the Windows SIG which meets the first Thursday of each month at the AARP Information Center in the Northway Mall. The HTML SIG is temporarily on hold until we find a qualified instructor/leader.

The door prizes were free shopping at Internet Alaska's apparel store. No price limit was indicated. Winners were Michael Lamb, Cathy Palmateer, Jeannine Lyerly, and Gerald R. Reed.

The Presentation

Hjalmar Syversen, Director of Consumer Marketing for Internet Alaska opened the presentation. He gave a short overview of Internet Alaska and then introduced Ms. Lori Coryell, Director of Business Services.

Lori has had considerable experience with network data circuits in her work at ATU and AT&T Alascom. Her main focus at this time is implementing and promoting the new services, IDSL and ADSL, now being offered. These are renditions of the frame relay technology which has been in general service in the lower 48 states for over five years. It is the interim step up between the old X.25 packet data service and the ultimate in high speed data service ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). It is not the same as ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and doesn't offer dial tone for concurrent telephone/data communications.

Internet Alaska, in cooperation with ATU, began offering the service in July of 1998. It offers full-time direct connections at 128 kbs. Burst transfer rates can be considerably higher than that. ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Loop) means that the uplink and downlink speeds are different. IDSL was not defined but probably means an Isometric (equal) Digital Subscriber Loop.

The service requires a special modem at the user end. At ATU, the subscriber loop terminates at a line card which consolidates the data stream with others and the stream is then piped to special equipment at Internet Alaska where the individual data streams are reassembled for processing and forwarding on to the Internet. The modems can be connected to a local area network which would then provide access to a number of users. Concurrent sessions for multiple LAN users was not discussed.

The service charges are similar to ISDN service. The external modem being offered at this time is $199.99. A lease plan is available also. There is an installation fee of $320. A substantial portion of this goes to ATU for the actual connection of the special telephone line and the Central Office connections. The monthly service rate is $49.95.

For additional information contact Lori Coryell at 562-4700 or Hjalmar Syversen at 562-4076.