ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Thursday, July 18, 1996                TAG: 9607180089
SECTION: BUSINESS                 PAGE: B-8  EDITION: METRO 
COLUMN: computer bits 


ON INTERNET, SEE M&M FACTORY AND ROANOKE VALLEY

NETSIGHT COMMUNICATIONS, based in Blue Ridge, offers `sort of an Internet Boutique' to users, according to creator David Fleming.

A major chunk of the appeal of the Internet is the way it lets us go on little offbeat excursions. In one sign-on, you can fiddle around with Roman papyrus files at Duke University, zoom to the White House for a look at the equally heavy tomes of The President's Council on Sustainable Development, and then pop into M&M's Studios.

The Duke Papyrus Archive lets you see and read about 1,373 papyri from ancient Egypt. This is pretty heady stuff, sure, but it's ideal for eggheads, and it's your tax money at work.

The Advanced Papyrological Information System, which is still under development, is a collaboration of six universities. The project has a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The schools will divvy up a like amount.

And don't think the content is all stuffy stuff; the documentary papyri include tax receipts and horoscopes. As an aside, you'll also learn that the Ptolemy boys, I to XIV, who ruled Egypt from 323 to 30 B.C., mostly married women named either Arsinoe, Berenice or Cleopatra.

By now, you're primed for the Sustainable Growth crowd's report on strategies for growing while still being protective of the environment.

Information is categorized according to task force groups, so that you can select your area of interest. Among the information you'll find is a group's goals, how it's trying to accomplish them and who is on the task force. International Wildlife recommends the site for the environmentally alert.

Chocoholics would recommend the next stop, M&M's Studios, or m-ms.com, a site devoted to the chocolate candies.

Visitors have several options at the site, which is a parody of a movie studio. Among them are a monorail tour of the grounds and a visit to a virtual factory with a complete explanation of how M&M's are made.

The site also features the adventures of the blue, red and yellow M&Ms. The characters look and sound like their counterparts on M&M's TV commercials. They even take turns spouting their original verse at the mike at Blue's Poetry Cafe.

A newspaper, The Hard Shell, chronicles the M&Ms high jinks at the site.

NetSight new server

An arrow flows through an open door and then the door shuts at the "return to homepage" message on a NetSight Communications page. It's one of several nice touches found on the Web site of the Roanoke Valley's newest Internet service provider.

NetSight, based in Blue Ridge, is the product of David Fleming. In one life, Fleming is a staff pharmacist at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. But he's mucked around in computers since the early '80s, when he had a small company in Wytheville building PCs and doing custom software.

Acknowledging that he's in a "very competitive" industry, since there are more than 3,000 Internet service providers, Fleming says his goal is to stay small and provide a huge amount of user support.

"My goal is to become sort of an Internet Boutique," he wrote in an e-mail.

According to marketing information on the NetSight pages, it connects directly to the Internet's "first nationwide fully meshed 45Mbps ATM network," whatever that means. What we found is that it works.

If you want to know more about him and his business, and his prices, you can find him at sight.net or 890-7018.

Roanoke Valley page

A couple of weeks ago, Roanoker Chris Muse debuted RoanokeValleyWeb.com, a site that when completed will give an outsider an inside view of the area. Topics will be as specific as Roanoke and its railroad history and where to find Frisbee golf and as general as Restaurants, Governments and Social Services and Lodging.

Muse has backing from Hotel Roanoke, Center in the Square and Roanoke Electric Steel for creation of the site. He plans to include writings from various area personalities as part of the fare.

The site takes a bit of time to load because it's heavy on graphics, but it promises to be a fruitful stop.

Muse, for folks who have been around a while, once started a downtown restaurant called The Blue Muse. It was not as satisfying an experience as the page will be, he said.

|ANCIENT PAPYRUS| |http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/papyrus| |SUSTAINABLE GROWTH| |http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP| |/pcsd/#council-report| |CHOCOHOLICS| |http://www.m-ms.com| |NEW LOCAL SERVER| |http://www.sight.net| |ROANOKE VALLEY PAGE| |http://www.RoanokeValleyWeb.com| You can contribute to this column or just comment by sending an E-mail to biznews@roanoke.infi.net or by calling 981-3393 or 981-3237 in the Roanoke Valley, or 1-800-346-1234, x393, outside the Roanoke area.


LENGTH: Medium:   95 lines































by CNB