A BAA Meeting at Network City

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 13

The BAA meeting at Network City in London on Thursday January 16th was an interesting departure from normal practice. Network City is a café that provides access to the Internet on its own machines for an hourly charge. The BAA hired a room for the evening with about twenty machines, and paid for the Internet access for the three hours of the meeting. It was possible to buy tea and coffee but unfortunately there was very little in the way of food (true to form I snaffled the last bun just before the meeting opened) and no alcoholic drinks at all. The machines were well configured and the staff very proficient and helpful. The only small problem was caused as usual by the APL character set. We needed to log in as network administrator on each machine in order to install the APL font before everyone arrived. The staff however were unruffled by this requirement and everything was achieved in time.

As the attendees were arriving we were treated to a demonstration of the Dyalog APL/W TCP/IP support with a Dyalog workspace on one of the machines running a "chat" session with a Turing machine in Basingstoke that purported to be Peter Donnelly. While the session was being set up by John Scholes in London he was having a concurrent phone conversation with Peter and could see the words appearing in his session at the same time that he could hear the keys being pressed in Basingstoke.

The meeting opened with a short talk by Ray Cannon about what we could hope to get from the internet and what resources were available to help us to get going. This was a little hampered by the lack of any demonstration facilities and we soon dispersed to separate machines while Ray and a couple of other relatively knowledgeable folk wandered round and helped people in trouble. This seemed quite successful and most of us learnt things from others.

One of the main interests was the display of APL characters on World Wide Web pages and we were shown how to configure both Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape 3 so that they could display the Vector Web pages correctly. There is an explanation of how to do this in Ray’s article, which follows. We also saw the HTML (hyper-text mark-up language) elements that the pages were using to specify the APL font using Netscape’s "view source" facility. Ray demonstrated a couple of search engines and used them to search for APL references on the Web. Most of them are mentioned in Jon Sandles’ article in this issue on getting the most from the Internet. Ray also demonstrated some Perl and some Java with which he had enlivened his home page.

Another feature of the meeting was the Internet Chat virtual meeting that was running at the same time and in which a number of us took part. Ray had set up a "room" and we were joined in it by a group at a satellite meeting in York as well as a couple of random passers by who dropped in, one of whom started to abuse us when nobody seemed to be talking to him. However he left as soon as it was explained that we were all APLers and after a lengthy explanation from me about what APL is, a sadly missed opportunity I feel, to add to the APL flock. The conversation between the York contingent and London was lively. The standard chat-up line seemed to be "Will you come and work for me?" to which the reply was "No, will you come and work for me?". There has to be an opportunity in there for someone.

On the whole I feel that the meeting was a success and that most of the attendees benefited from it. I enjoyed meeting in the evening when everyone seemed more relaxed. It is a pity that the venue was a little short of variety in the food and drink department.