Copyright 1994 The Seattle Times Company
The Seattle Times
December 18, 1994, Sunday, Final Edition
SECTION: PERSONAL TECHNOLOGY; NEIGHBORHOOD STOPS; Pg. J4
LENGTH: 548 words
HEADLINE: SEATTLE'S PAN MAKES DEBUT WITH SOME IMPRESSIVE RESULTS
BYLINE: BY MIGUEL LLANOS
BODY:
The long talked-about City of Seattle Public Access Network (PAN) has come out with its first public release, and you can travel several roads to get to it.
Right now, the content is divided by categories such as arts, community, education, employment, environment, government and transportation, but PAN plans to fine-tune it using feedback from the public. Most impressive is PAN's ability to search for keywords from any menu. And its jobs section is promising, allowing one to search by job title or minimum salary.
PAN also lets you choose between plain text and a point-and-click version that uses icons as menu options. The latter requires RIPTerm, a software developed for electronic bulletin boards, on your hard drive. The software is available free via PAN and many Internet and BBS sites. PAN expects to have a public site on the World Wide Web by early next year, and that should provide a much more elegant visual presentation than RIPTerm.
How to get there:
Direct modem dial: 233-7100
Internet: telnet
pan.ci.seattle.wa.us
Library gateways: King County (382-2116) and Seattle Public (386-4142).
For voice help using PAN: 386-1200. Just ask Bill (Gates). On Jan. 3, Microsoft's mogul starts a twice-a-month column in newspapers nationwide. He's even got the time (or is it a hired hand?) to answer questions from readers on any computing subject. The address:
askbill@microsoft.com Snow business. The Husky Winter Sports Ski School has created a World Wide Web site that allows online registration and links to skiing and snowboarding newsgroups. It's at:
http://weber.u.washington.edu/finch/HWShome.html (no hyphens) The UW site also links to the Cascade Ski Report, hosted by Issaquah-based Internet Service Company. The site provides snow levels and weekday weather forecasts by UW meteorologist Jim Steenburg. You can also get there directly:
http://www.net-serve.com/ski-report.html (hyphens only after net and ski)
Site developer Jim Bachesta eventually plans to add pictures of the ski slopes and the runs currently open. And even if you don't have a visual "browser" like Mosaic to get the full flavor of the Web, your Internet provider probably has lynx, which provides text-only access. Try typing lynx at your command line and the return key. For those limited to e-mail, reports are available via: listserver@net-serve.com In the message itself type: get ski-report index Seattle Sounders. Claiming to be the first soccer club to have its own Web page, the Seattle Sounders have gone online with team stats, a group picture and links to U.S. and foreign soccer sites. It's at:
http://www.halcyon.com/zipgun/sounders/sounders.html (no hyphen) FBI tracking bomber. It's been out there a while, but worth a reminder even though it hasn't been updated since November: The FBI's Internet site with background on the UNABOM bombings.
Web: http://naic.nasa.gov/fbi
Gopher: naic.nasa.gov
Via gopher, choose Government Resources at the main menu, then FBI. New sound waves. The Seattle Times two Sundays ago ran a story on "ambient" music and its online origins. There's a central gopher archive on the Internet (includes information on another phenomenon, raves) at:
gopher hyperreal.com