Street corner web browser spotted in the Netherlands
4 May 1997
We met the future last week in the Netherlands. At the corner of
Spui and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal in
downtown Amsterdam a street corner web browser is nestled into a
bank of pay phones. Inside a slim case of anodized aluminum it
has a color screen the size of a sheet of paper, a trackball,
and a ruggedized keyboard. You pay for it with a prepaid phone
card available at the post office; .25 guilders for two minutes
or about 6 cents US per minute. It seems to be running MSIE 3.0
on top of Windows 95. It's a capable web browser; it runs java
applets admirably and supports Microsoft's limited version of
javascript. We were even able to view Quicktime movies.
In a vote of no confidence, Active X is disabled --
presumably it causes problems for administration and security.
It has a little printer; we were able to find it's location on
Mapquest and make a printout for a charge of .50 guilders.
(about .25 cents US) We were also successful in sending an
E-mail to a friend; once this kind of device is common, an
account with a web E-mail service such as Rocketmail would make
it possible to access E-mail anywhere in the world. People
are using it; when I tried to use it several times, I had
to wait for others to get off. Another time I had to wait
for a PTT Telecom employee to finish cleaning the phones.
8 May 1997
I received an E-mail from a Kansas City resident who has seen
public internet kiosks in Kansas City. This reminded me that
I'd seen one in the airport when I was in Kansas City in
March but that it wasn't working at the time. The home
page of the Amsterdam web browser is a web page in Dutch
called
Planet Internet.
For internet sleuths in the audience, an
E-mail with headers that I sent from
it.
More
images are available:
The front and back
of the prepaid phone card.
A photograph of the
browser running an applet. And
another photograph of
the browser from the side.
Links
Photography: Olivia DiRenzo
Writing: Paul Houle
Copyright © 1997
honeylocust media systems,
contact paul@honeylocust.com