So what are all these "Lynx inspected" buttons on your site?

Well first, a short story. I had uncovered an old Compaq laptop. It is a 386, no math co-processor, 1 parallel, 1 serial, and 1 PS2 port, a 28k modem and only a 115 Mb hard drive. It runs on DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1. After spending some time tweaking, cleaning, and all around meddling, I found that it could me useful to me. One of the first things I did was try IE 3.+ on it. Although it worked, it was painfully slow (even with all the graphics disabled). While I was working on this website, I had read a lot about text browsers and thought I would check them out.

During my work with Linux, I had heard about Lynx, and when I found a Lynx version that would run on DOS, I started to check it out. There were so many versions, I was having a hard time finding what I wanted/needed. That is when I found http://members.kingston.net/lewis/, this site made it very easy to decide what I needed. In fact, right near the top s/he has 3 links, one for 386's and smaller, one for Windows 95+ machines and one for the middle ground. So I decided to get one for my laptop (it is called Bobcat) and one for my Desktop (DOSlynx for Win32).

Both of these versions were incredible easy to set-up, and I was serfing in no time at all. What was so refreshing was the speed at which I could serf. After a while I went to a site I knew was full of news (i.e. text), but also full of ads (i.e. graphics) - I was serfing that site at speeds that I do not obtain at work (where we have a dedicated line).

Now I am not suggesting that you would use your text browers exclusively, I don't. In fact, it is not uncommon for me to have both browsers open at the same time. I serf with Lynx, then when needed I use my graphics browser. Just check it out! Who knows, you may just like it!!

If you are happy with what you got, then by all means, stay with it. But if you just serf the web for news and information, if you are fed up with waiting for pages to load and reload, or you want to breath new life into the old computer - you really need to check out Lynx (or Bobcat).

LYNX's offical website is at http://lynx.browser.org, and it would be a good place to start. You will find links to endless amount of information. And since these sites are mostly text, it will give you a small ideal of what it is like to serf with text browsers. If you do decide to check one out, I would HIGHLY suggest getting it from http://members.kingston.net/lewis/. S/he seems to be quite respected in the Lynx rings (evidenced by the number of links that returned me to his/her site). Also, although I only tried a total of 3 Lynx versions, this one was the easiest. I had also tried 2 versions of Bobcat, and once again, this one was the easiest.

If you want to see Lynx for yourself, you can check out one of the Public Access Lynx. Here you will find a list of telnet sites to use. I do not know how it works, nor could I get it to work for me, but maybe you can. The last one in the list will take you to a site that you can enter in any Web address and see how it looks with Lynx. But you cannot browse with it.

One day, when I become a Lynx super user ;-), I will be putting my own contributions here. Right now, I am still a newbie, so for now you will have to settle for using others work.

I know that ANSII art is not the best thing for speech rendering browsers, but I really liked this on. Hopefully by putting it at the bottom will not cause any problems for anyone. If it does, please contact me and let me know.

     |              |      So many sites, so little time....
   .' `.          .' `.    Why pussyfoot around with window
  ; :   \_..--.._/   : .   dressing?  Take BIG bytes out
  | . '            ` . |   of the 'net with
  '   ___        ___   `                 dF
  '  `.  `.    .'  .'  `                dF
 :     `-.|    |.-'     :              dF   Yb  dF  dbdHb  7p dF
 .     .  `    '  .     ,             dF     YbdF  dF  dF  .dF'
 /      `. \  / .'      \            dFdFdF   XF  dF  dF  oF'Tb
`,'  . . .` `' '. . .  `.'                   dF
 `,'    .__.--.__.    `.'                   dF   and DosLynx
  `,'                `.'
   `,'-`;::....::;'-`.'            from the University of Kansas
    `    ''::::``    '

ASCII art by Dan Strychalski   dski@cameonet.cameo.com.tw   Dec. 1995

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