The Online World by Odd De Presno

visible prompts at all. Everything happens in a two-way stream of unintelligent data. The only menus that the user sees, are those belonging to the program running on his personal computer. Some services emphasize colors, graphics and sound. They may require that users have certain hardware or special add-on cards in their communications computer. Often, a special communications program is also needed. Other services use methods for presenting colors and graphics already built into their users' computers (and programs). Colors, graphics and sound are highly desirable in some applications, like online games and weather forecasts. But even where it is not important, there will always be many wanting it. To the professional on a fact-gathering mission, these features may give slower data transfer and problems when saving text to disk for later use. Therefore, many prefer ASCII text with no extras. Sports cars are nice, but for delivering furniture they're seldom any good. The same applies to the user interfaces. No one is perfect for all applications. Level 6: The data transporters ------------------------------ When the online service's host computer is far away, the user often faces the challenges of: