Sometime during the early part of April, while we were still in Florida, I made a decision. It had become perfectly clear to me that I must be able to share a single modem across my network. Or, to put it another way, the lap top computer in my bedroom (beyond reasonable range from a phone plug) must be able to dial up the Internet Service Provider through the modem on my office computer. Then the search grew a bit in scope because I suddenly found myself overseeing the installation of a mid-sized LAN at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Obviously they would have to have the same function available for the LAN. Instead of two computers, I was suddenly thinking in terms of up to 25 stations. I was relaxed about it because, being the enternal optimist, I expected little or no difficulty in accomplishing the mission. Read on!

This unfortunate fact was quickly discovered. Neither Win95 or NT made provision for modem or serial port sharing across even a two machine network. No exceptions. Period. Silly . . . but true. So the search started. I found three programs. One was a very expensive package for large networks. Out it went. The second was called WinGate. It's free for one user and two computers, but their prices are reasonable even for 25 work stations. A friend took that one and set it up (more later). The third, iShare, an Artisoft product that seemed to hold a great deal of promise. iShare became my assignment and is the subject of the day.

iShare claims that any machine on the network can use the modem. And, with frustrating limitations discussed further down the page, the promise bears fruit. Installation is simple. Designate one machine as the server, the rest as clients. Both start up automatically and rest quietly on the Task Bar until called upon to do their thing. The only visible screen is the server setup screen, although there is precious little to setup.

As you can see there is little to do on the first page of the folder. The server can be turned off here but there is not need to bring up the screen to accomplish that. Just click on the icon with the right mouse button and select the "stop" option. The only other choice to be made is on the Security page where this a space to select the ISP you wish to dial. Nothing else needs attention unless you are a serious network administrator of a large LAN.

First attempts at anything under Win95 rarely work. This "basic law" is rarely broken. It took a while to figure out why. Finally I read the error message very carefully and translated it into a logical thought (never an easy task). The server had two modems, one internal, one external. The internal one had been removed as far as the control panel was concerned and it did not show up on the system list. I had simply forgotten that it was there. But, iShare hadn't been told about the removal so when I tried to dial from the remote computer, the program looked first at the internal modem, tried to dial and said "sorry, no link possible" or words to that effect.

After about 20 complete rechecks, the light emerged from the dark recesses of my weary brain. I removed the old movement and BANG--I could hear the dialing from the next room! Everything worked perfectly and I soon found that I could have one computer linked to a URL and then dash to the other room and link the server to a different URL. Hey, I thought, this is real high tech. I didn't quite shout EUREKA!, but the thought crossed my mind.

All it took to link the lap top to the Internet was to open a product like Eudora. Double click the program's icon and iShare begins the linking process. The same is true with Netscape, any other browser or net based program. Unfortunately, this is a good-news, bad-news situation. If you wish to work offline on either browser or mail program, the linking process begins the minute the program loads. There is seemingly no way to avoid the dial process if the program is open.

Thus, I can only conclude that this program has no place on a laptop that is used outside the home on hotel or airport phone plugs. I am not certain you could ever get beyond the error messages. It obviously does have a place on a peer-to-peer network where the stations are fixed and where there is little or no need for off-line work on the client machine(s). In that case, it does seem a little bit like magic when you have two machines sharing the single line without an apparent loss of speed. But I think the bad outweighs the good here and I don't feel the package is worth the price.

WinGate, a free product for a single user with two machines, seems to suffer from the same problem. However, there have been several suggestions on the WG Usernet that might prove to solve the problem. The most logical--setting your browser default opening to a local file on a local drive rather than a net URL. We will give it a try and report later on.