Forte's AGENT still rocks (But I miss Magellan)
One of my most fond memories in the computer world is my dad buying me a copy of Lotus Magellan 2.0.’Like its name would imply, the program was designed to search and explore our then-cavernous 20 MB hard drives under MS-DOS. It would find any file, any text within a program and do many other things. To reuse the metaphor it was the Swiss Army Knife of utilities under DOS.
I used it religiously until Windows 95 made it useless and Lotus shelved Magellan. (It is such a loved program that people have put up Web pages lamenting its demise, something I dare say doesn’t happen a lot about software, Apple fans notwithstanding.)
The only surviving program that I still have any fondness for (or, for which I still have fondness) is Forte’s Agent, a program that is little known outside of the bowels of the Internet.
In the early days of the Internet there were a couple of distinct divisions. One became the World Wide Web, one was IRC (the chat area) and the other was (and sort of remains) Usenet, the discussion area. Unlike chat, Usenet served as a bulletin board for the Internet. You’d “post” something and someone else would come along and comment on it, posting on top of yours.
Today there are more than 50,000 discussion topics on Usenet, ranging from Disneyworld (one of my favorites) to adoption and relationships. (Of those 50,000, only about 5 percent are worth reading; many have degenerated into spam-filled cesspools.) A good deal of these are adult in nature, so this is not a place for kids. There also are many “binaries” groups that share photographs, music and other files.
In order to read the discussions and participate you needed a “newsreader.” The best of those was Agent, a program that makes navigating the many discussions easier.
The latest version is Agent 3.1, a great upgrade to the venerable program. You log in to your Internet Service Provider’s “news server” and let it gather up the boards that your ISP subscribes to. In most cases the name of your ISP’s news server is “news.yourisp.com” where “yourisp.com” is the name of your ISP.
Once you have the list downloaded (this can take a while over a dial-up connection) then you can search for the topics that interest you. Once you find one that may be up your alley you can sample the content of the group or “subscribe” to the group to make it easier to find it again.
When you log in each time you get the “headers” of the group downloaded to your reader (that’s like a subject line in an e-mail). If you want to read the post you can click on it and it will download the whole “body” of message or file.
Agent is offered in two flavors; the whole program is $29 or you can get a free version supported by ads (no popups or spyware, however) called “Free Agent”. If your ISP does not have a news server (AOL for example) you can subscribe to one for $2.95 that works with Agent.
You can sample the world of newsgroups by using the Web by heading to “groups.google.com”. It’s a sampling of what’s out there but it’s a pretty awful way to participate in the discussion long-term. It also doesn’t have the full list of groups available, which may or may not be a good thing.
You can get all the information about Agent at www.forteinc.com
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James Derk is co-owner of CyberDads, a computer repair firm, and computer columnist for Scripps Howard News Service. His e-mail address is jim@cyberdads.com
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