Splashy graphics: A World Group system can have its own individual splash screen; system administrators merely need to design one, name it 'SPLASH.BMP' and place it in the root directory.

Client set-up: The configuration screen for a user to establish a connection with a World Group system.

World Group: More than just a BBS, it handles Internet too

Today's quick quiz: Why would you partner with an America Online when you can put up a better service yourself?

Don't think it's possible? Then you haven't seen Galacticomm's new World Group.

World Group is more than just another electronic bulletin board service. It is a client-server package with multimedia support and some wild tricks -- including the ability to multitask the modem.

World Group also can be your Internet server. Not only does it offer all the usual suspects, such as Telnet, FTP and World-Wide Web servers and clients, World Group allows you to set up proxy addressing for your clients, which means you can run an unlimited number of users off a basic Internet setup.

Best of all, World Group is fully backward compatible with older equipment -- including Apple II and CP/M machines!

Clients, fat and thin
Client/server computing has been one of the holy grails of small-platform computing since the invention of the microprocessor.

Things were pretty straightforward in the days of the mainframe: Data resided on the mainframe, and users accessed them through dumb terminals.

Things got complicated with the advent of the microcomputer: Data could be on anyone's machine. That led to the invention of client-server computing, where the client -- the user's software -- drew just the data it needed from the server.

Slow networks led to the creation of the fat client, which stored data on a local hard drive and resorted to the server only to pull changes from it.

Which brings us to World Group: Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based Galacticomm's engineers realized that a fat client setup could mean an enormous improvement in the perceived speed of on-line communications.

Think about it: Why do you always have to wait around for your web browser to load your home page? Most users' home pages change very little from use to use; heavily used home pages such as those set up by Netscape or America Online are fundamentally collections of links to topic home pages, where most new links and such appear.

So why is the home page loaded each time over a modem, which is the digital equivalent of a couple of tin cans and some string?

Using World Group for the first time can be a bit of a shock. World Group systems offer terrific graphics and multimedia on-line with almost instantaneous response because of the fat client: These bandwidth hogs are pumped over the phone line to your hard drive as compressed files, then are uncompressed and played from there.

In other words, a service with a huge photo-laden title page accompanied by trumpet flourishes blasts right off -- because it is loading through the hundreds of megabytes per second datapipe from your hard drive, not your modem.

Even an Integrated Services Digital Network (Isdn) connection can't compete with a hard drive's performance, never mind one of the 2400 bps modems your users are likely to use.

Even better, World Group can download a half-dozen or more of these files simultaneously in the background while your users use your service -- checking their e-mail, reading your electronic product, or whatever.

Here's how it works: Modern error-correcting modems and software ensure your files get through correctly by checking each packet. The sending modem moves the packet, then waits until the receiving modem sends back a message that says, "I got it, and it's OK." (Or a message that says, "There's a problem -- resend that packet.")

World Group queues up files and sends packets from one down the data pipe while the others are awaiting a response. As soon as an "OK" is received, the next packet joins the queue, allowing the modem to sustain maximum throughput, rather than sending short bursts and waiting.

Your own America Online
World Group offers a full range of Internet services, including a World-Wide Web server, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol support, Network News Transfer Protocol for reading Usenet Newsgroups, File Transfer Protocol, Telnet, finger -- the whole nine yards.

Better yet, it offers proxy Internet Protocol addressing. Normally, everything on the Internet needs a permanent IP address. As a provider, you would have to generate and maintain IP addresses for all your subscribers if they are going to use Web browsers or similar Internet connections.

World Group gets around this by assigning each user a TCP protocol port on the fly. In other words, the sixth user to log on would become something like 1.1.1.1 port 6. An added benefit is that you don't have to support IP addressing for your users, which can involve talking them through their Winsock installation.

The practical result is that this setup allows almost unlimited growth for your system. Normally, you get 254 IP addresses when you register. You'd go through those in a week if you assigned them permanently. With proxy addressing, you could save a half-dozen for routers and still allow 64,000 simultaneous Slip or PPP connections before you'd run out of addresses.

We should all have such problems.

The user interface can be as simple or elaborate as you like. World Group looks like any standard Windows program. You can use the dozen or so icons that come with the package, or add your own. You can have plain windows, or fill them with graphics.

And you can have your service say "Welcome!" every time a user logs on, if they have a sound card and speakers and you really like that sort of thing.

World Group doesn't cut you off from users with older computers. The package includes support for older systems with RIP graphics, and even terminal emulation for CP/M machines, TRS-80s and Commodore 64s. (Of course, you don't get the client/server GUI client if you're running a C-64. You get text, which is what your machine can handle.)

Black boxes
World Group can run on almost anything, including OS/2. If you want to take full advantage of the software, however, you'll need a Pentium running DOS.

World Group doesn't like disk compression; don't install the system software on a compressed drive. (You can put file and data libraries on compressed drives, however.)

And, as with every other piece of software lately, buy RAM and hard drives in bulk. You can run the system with less than 16 megabytes of RAM; it won't be happy, and neither will you. You'll want a least a gigabyte hard drive; World Group will take up 60 to 100 megabytes without really trying.

When it comes to signing on, a fully loaded Pentium box can support up to 256 simultaneous users.

World Group works well with local area networks such as Novell's Netware. The World Group client can be set to connect via the network or a Telnet session, as well as via modem.

The network support allows World Group to act as an Internet gateway. Portions of the server -- data, for example -- also can be offloaded to the network.

A question of security
World Group has a terrific security setup. It works on the concept of keys: Every user has a virtual key ring that the system checks before allowing them to use a menu, icon, process -- every single thing on the server is subject to security.

A user without a key not only cannot use, say, the Internet connection -- he or she can't even see it. World Group hides all options unless a user has rights.

But World Group also allows security to be applied to connections. You can decide, for example, that someone with sysop access can use it only while working at a particular machine that's in a secure location, or over an unlisted telephone number that's not in your hunt group.

That means that if bad guys steal your sysop's wallet and get the sysop ID and password, they still can't do anything unless they also manage to break into your building and use that machine in the locked room.

World Group also can be configured as a secure firewall between your LAN and the Internet.

Picture perfect?
Is World Group the perfect product? Not exactly: