Technical
SlipKnot's rendering engine was written in C, and its user interface in Visual Basic. Because it had only a Unix commandline to communicate with, it "drove" the Unix host by sending characters to its commandline as if a person were typing them (as a "bot"). First, SlipKnot would request the retrieval of individual parts of a desired web page—the text, and then each picture—into files on the Unix host. This was done by executing the text-based web browser "lynx" on the Unix host with command-line arguments indicating which URL to retrieve, and the filename to create on the Unix host when the data was finally retrieved. This retrieval, from web page host to Unix host, was usually very fast, since these machines were connected by high speed communications lines. After the URL contents were moved to the Unix host, they had to be moved down to the PC. This was done by executing the communications program zmodem (sending the zmodem command to the Unix command-line) and then instantly placing the PC into receive mode.
Once the text (HTML) portion of a web page had been retrieved (it was always retrieved first), the page would be displayed by SlipKnot and could be read by the user, after which the pictures were retrieved in the background and eventually the page fixed up to display them.
Read more about this topic: SlipKnot (web Browser)
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