I got the DeskMate version to work (several times, I might add, no idea what Ole's problem is
) by installing plain DeskMate 3.05 and then downloading and running the DMAEIN.PDM file, and making sure a simple WATTCP.CFG file was in the same directory (everything was in a DESKMATE directory). The system was an 80286 with VGA running IBM PC DOS 2000. The network card was an Intel Etherexpress 8/16 running in 8-bit mode. I had no issues whatsoever with the client or my hardware or internet connection, so I feel I experienced the best AEIN had to offer. Here are my impressions based on that experience:
AEIN is best compared to an information retrieval service of the 1980s, such as Compuserve or Genie. Because it has rudimentary graphics capability (2-color bitmaps and 16-color line drawing), it is actually more similar to Prodigy. Information is requested by using the interface to read pages, and if a page has what AEIN calls "Related Pages", you can read those as well. Options exist to jump to different pages, enter data, and there is a rudimentary search function. It is probably best described as "Gopher with vector graphics".
Pros:
Very fast! Deskmate's drawing routines are decent, and it's obvious there is very little information being transmitted, so pages pop up as quickly as you'd expect them to (I waited no longer than about a second for a new page). It also appears that files can be locally downloaded, although I did not test this feature. Because each page is small (mostly text), nothing is cached to disk, so disk requirements (beyond that of Deskmate), are minimal.
There are very few vector graphics on the system, but the few that are there are welcome surprises.
Cons:
The interface is pretty bad. Not Deskmate itself, but how AEIN is controlled and operated, especially navigation history. You can go down a path, such as StartPage -> Directory -> Reference -> etc. but the "prev. page" function (which is not tied to a single key, you must use the menu) does not traverse that path going backwards -- it usually goes back a page or maybe two, then stops. You have to then start all over by picking one of the four main pages. Confusing matters is that the same keys for navigation are also used for menus. For example, while "2" on a page means "see related pages", once you hit it you get a menu of pages where 1-9 selects a menu item. Having the same keys ("2") change function within the same context (reading pages) is a UI no-no! I grew frustrated trying to navigate the information on AEIN, to the point where I felt discouraged enough to stop exploration.
There are forums, but no single directory of what forums there are -- you must use the search function to find them (search for "forum"), but since the search is limited to 9 results and there are 9 results returned, you have no idea what forums exist past the 9 returned results.
There is an Encyclopedia, but the only way to read it is to search for a term, and I couldn't find any terms that existed. An Index would have been useful to see what entries existed, instead of guessing.
Other than posting to the forums, no user contribution of data is possible (only the AEIN admin can add new information).
Verdict and Suggestions:
I'm not sure what author's goal was in creating AEIN. When first read about it, I got very excited, as the screenshots of the windows client implied it was a hobby project to recreate the cooler elements of Prodigy as a demonstration of what graphical online hypertext systems looked like before the web existed. However, based on the author's comments, the website, and the data on AEIN itself, I now think that the author believes he is creating a viable alternative to the web, something with very questionable practicality given how pervasive the world wide web is. (I will be referring to the web a lot more below.)
The author likes to explain about how AEIN is very resource-friendly, but the entire purpose and usefulness of the system suffers as a result. If resource usage was the actual goal, I would have liked to see a service where a back-end server acts as a proxy for the actual world wide web -- stripping out graphics and/or dithering them down to 2 colors, compressing the text, etc. -- and the client would be a very thin client that interacted with that proxy. That would give the same user experience and resource usage on very low-end platforms, but with the entire world's collective public information at their fingertips. Also, the author seems to think that what has been asked for (CGA, Hercules) is "too low-end" to be supportable. The whole point of AEIN is low-end! Any 386 or higher can navigate the Web in at least the same presentation as AEIN provides, so there is no point on running AEIN on anything higher than a 386 with VGA. AEIN needs to embrace its only viable target market -- 286s and lower, VGA and lower (everything lower, including text mode!). An 8088 with CGA cannot practically retrieve hypertext mixed with graphics, so AEIN has an opening here if it wants to gain "hobby street cred".
The DOS client appears to have been developed in a vacuum. Since the days of Mosaic in 1993, navigation history was automatically kept track of, and a single key/button traversed that history backwards, page by page, until you were back at the beginning (and a "forward" key/button also existed). Easily navigating the information on AEIN is absolutely a requirement moving forward if the author expects AEIN to be taken seriously. There is no shame in copying traditional hypertext system interfaces -- they work for a reason! I recommend that the author redesign how AEIN's navigation works, and how links/pages/branches are presented.
Users must be able to contribute to the system in order for it to grow and for them to gain/retain interest. To that end, the spec on how to create and format graphics and text should be published. If no such spec exists, the source code for the various clients should be made open.
