11.the internet



ORGANIZATION

You're kidding right?  In general the Internet has very limited organization, which almost always pertains to the protocols that everyone agrees upon in order to make some sort of order out of chaos.  These are called RFC's (Request for Comments) and available for perusal at sri.nic.whatever.  Be forewarned that unless you are actually interested in the inner-workings of a given protocol, or want to write one of your own; these treastises tend to be mind-numbingly boring, and about as exciting to read as E911 documentation or back issues of IEEE Spectrum.  --  If I've just insulted you and cast dispersions at some of your favorite reading material, then go download the RFC's 'cause man, you're gonna love 'em.

     Anyway, you probably don't really care how STUFF gets from here to there, you just want to know where the hell to find what you're looking for, or even a place that you can start skimming through, to figure out that what you've always wanted to make your life perfect, is the latest copy of Castle Wolfenstein 3-D. 

     This is where a lot of the information navigation utilities come into play.  The Internet actually IS a tremendous storehouse of information and knowledge . . . the problem is that there is such an overwhelming amount of junk you have to wade through in order to find what you're looking for, that the process can be very daunting -- even if you're familiar with it.  It's kind of like standing at the edge of a giant, fetid black pool, full of viscus sludge, as the shambling mass from under the bed wanders into your field of vision, holding a chainsaw in one hand, and an hourglass in the other, cackling with glee as the hours pass and you find yourself no closer to your goal than when you began.  Because -- Freudian metaphors aside -- finding what you're looking for is like diving into that pool and trying to locate a small handful of diamonds that are submerged in all that shit surrounding them.



WARNINGS:  The Net is NOT MindVox, we cannot be responsible for what you do,
see, and encounter.  Cautions about obtaining software.

What viruses are and are not, and how you CANNOT get them . . .

Concept / Origins

The Usenet News Groups

Usenet News, or simply News as its usually referred to, is the world's largest distributed bulletin board.  At the time of this writing MindVox receives an average of 60-75 megabytes of news every day, spanning the conversational spectrum in over 6,500 different categories (newsgroups). 

     The concept of an electronic distributed -- as opposed to centralized -- bulletin board, dates back to 1979 and the release of Unix system 7 which for the first time included UUCP (unix to unix copy).  Two graduate students at Duke University named Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis wrote a series of shellscripts that would allow messages to be distributed across two different sites.  After a period of testing and playing around with its functionality and purpose, Tom Truscott came out with the first news software, which is now referred to as the "A" news release.

     That was then, this is now, and the software that actually moves news from site to site has become increasingly layered and full-featured; the main system used to send news back and forth across the net is called "C News" which is in a perpetual state of being re-written and updated as mechanisms designed for much smaller load, and limited funtionality creak under the uses they are presently being applied to.  A completely "clean" re-write of the news software, called INN is also gaining in popularity as it moves away from beta test and towards stability.  INN represents the first of a new generation of programs designed to handle news, while C News is the current evolutionary extension of the original public A News release in 1980.

     Other than providing some basic background information about the origins of where News came from, the previous paragraphs have no direct bearing on what the Usenet means to you, since for the most part its completely irrelevent whether messages arrive via C News, INN, or are hand delivered by trained seals who glide across the desolate cityscape of the late twentieth century, focused on their life or death mission of delivering the words of the prophets from node to node. 

     Once it has arrived and been unpacked, News lives within eight major categories, or Hierarchies as they're called.  These are: alt, comp, misc, news, sci, soc, talk, and rec.

     Each hierarchy is organized by specific areas of concentration, and focus of discussion, with the notable exception of alt, which is a kind of catch-all place where "everything else" gets thrown.  Naturally enough, most of the more interesting groups are contained within the alt hierarchy.

     A brief explanation of the hierarchies; 

comp

     Comp stands for Computer(s) and the topics covered within this area drift from concepts such as mail, printing, and networks, and focus down to specifics such as makes and models of computers, where you can ask something like, "When I try to format my Maxtor SCSI disk on my Acorn Archmides I get a SCSI_ERROR sense-mode 9 message, can someone please help?" and expect to get half a dozen replies within a few hours, at least one of which will contain something that is likely to help you.

misc

     The Misc hierarchy is an "official" catch-all area where "everything else" gets tossed.  This is in contrast to alt, which is the "unofficial" and much more chaotic dark-side of misc.  To give an example, you'll find newsgroups such as; misc.entrepreneurs, misc.fitness, misc.invest.real-estate, and misc.taxes, within the misc area. 

news

     The News groups are concerned with the actual transport, administration, newsreaders, statistics and general maintenance of the global news system itself.  Topics can range from the practical "How do I get this to run?" to the more philosophical, "Where will the usenet be in 10 years?"  If you're interested in how News works, and how it might work better in the near and long-term future, this is the place where many of the people who wrote the software that makes news possible, can be found holding conversations and answering questions. 

sci

     The sci groups deal exclusively with the application of the sciences.  Here more than anywhere else on the net the messages are less prone to excessive outbursts and prolonged emotional diatribes, and focused more on problem solving, the exchange of specialized knowledge in a variety of fields, and actual collaborative efforts on various projects.  The sci groups have an extremely high content-to-noise ratio, something that is rare on the Usenet as a whole, where anybody with an opinion and half-formulated concept, is likely to let the world know all about it.

soc

     Soc deals primarily with social issues, interactions and different cultures.  It isn't so much an area to gossip, as it is as examination of the customs of various places throughout the world, and how people have chosen to interact with one another.

talk

     Talk groups are almost exclusively debate-oriented and focus on issues such as abortion, women's rights, political outlooks and worldviews, and topics which generally spawn very long discussions without an appreciable begining or ending, few or no resolutions, and quite often extremely sparse facts, surrounded by a great deal of emotional venting. 

rec

     Rec groups together topics that fall under the general category of recreation.  Various sports, games, car clubs, and hobby-type interests are all lumped together in this area.  Some creative arts pursuits such as writing and music, also have sub-categories in the rec section.

alt

     The collective usenet in its entirety, is often called a perfect example of a working anarchy.  The alt hierarchy is the single greatest, currently existing example of this concept at work.











Telnet

Telnet is a very simple protocol that has one basic purpose: to open a connection from MindVox to a remote system that is also running the telnet protocol and capable of receiving your request.

     An analogy is typing atdt<number> or dial<number> from your terminal program.  Within this extremely simple paradigm, lies a tremendous amount of flexibility, since you can effectively use telnet to travel the Internet, or even cross-connect to other networks, using "chaining" to weave a path that might originate in New York, and within the space of a few seconds, take your prescence and move it to another country. 

     To open a telnet connection to another site, you'd type: 

	telnet sitename

     Or

	telnet

     And then select options from within the telnet client, using the command:

	open sitename

     To start the remote session.

     In addition to telnet, MindVox also allows you to use Telnet3270, which is functionaly identical to the telnet application, except that it has been specifically optimized to interface with IBM 3270 machines.  And Hytelnet, which is actually a very simple-to-use, lightbar-driven interface that lets you scroll through a wide range of possible places you might want to visit, and then launches the telnet client for you automatically when you want to initiate the connection.

     If you wish to launch Telnet3270, type: 

	tn3270

     To access Hytelnet, simply type (surprise):

	hytelnet

     And assuming you are set up for full-screen emulation, you'll be presented with a menu very similar to the one below: 

                          Welcome to HYTELNET
                              version 6.4

                   What is HYTELNET?         <WHATIS>
                   Library catalogs          <SITES1>
                   Other resources           <SITES2>
                   Help files for catalogs   <OP000>
                   Catalog interfaces        <SYS000>
                   Internet Glossary         <GLOSSARY>
                   Telnet tips               <TELNET>
                   Telnet/TN3270 escape keys <ESCAPE.KEY>
                   Key-stroke commands       <HELP>

        .............................................................
   Up/Down arrows MOVE       Left/Right arrows SELECT     ? for HELP anytime

                   m  returns here       q  quits
        .............................................................

                HYTELNET 6.4 was written by Peter Scott

     All movement is controlled by the arrows keys, with the exception of "m" which brings you back to the top-level meny, "q" which quits out of Hytelnet, and the question mark "?" which brings up a help menu.


FTP / File Transfer Protocol (Fourier Transform Protocol)

FTP is really nothing more than a very specialized transfer protocol.  It does not break any new ground, or do anything earth-shatteringly different then Xmodem, Ymodem, Zmodem or Kermit, it's just another transfer protocol.  The difference is that FTP is specifically tuned for use over TCP/IP -- which is the protocol used to connect computers together over the ethernet, or run over SLIP/PPP when used over dial-up lines. 

     FTP will *ONLY* work over TCP/IP, you cannot "ftp" a file to your home computer, unless you are running some version of TCP/IP and have a copy of FTP that is compatible with your machine, *AND* you are running a SLIP or PPP link into MindVox.  

     This situation pertains to all of half-a-dozen people at most, since 99% of you will be using some sort of terminal program to connect your computer to MindVox through a modem and then downloading files from us to you, using Ymodem or Zmodem.  This is as it should be, the only time you will likely ever use ftp, is when you want to get a piece of software from some other host that has a live connection to the Internet. 

     Although it may be kind of different at first, you'll rapidly understand the benefits after you've experimented with it for a while.  LARGE PC-oriented software distribution systems claim all the newest shareware, and 30 or 40 gigabytes online.  The Internet is the largest distributed file server on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of gigabytes available to download.  A SMALL ftp site averages 20 gigabytes, with larger sites moving into the TERRABYTE range with "links" and "mirrors" to still more sites.

     In any case, to invoke FTP, you merely type:  ftp  at any central command prompt on MindVox.  This will place you within the ftp application, which is waiting for you to tell it which site you wish to access.  Alternatively you can also supply an arguement to the command line, such as:  ftp cs.orst.edu  which would start ftp and open a connection to the cs.orst.edu ftp server.

FTP COMMANDS:

When you are in ftp and it is in "local" mode, you will get a command prompt that looks like this: 

ftp> 

     From this prompt you can hit a question mark "?" to get a listing of the available commands.  In this tutorial we will be focusing on the main commands you are likely to make use of in any given ftp session.  Although there are many bells and whistles available to you, as you grow more familiar with its use, the central command set for ftp is really no more than about 5 commands.

     The main command you will be using if you invoked ftp without an arguement is called "open" -- Open does just what you'd expect it to do, it opens a connection from MindVox to another machine, which is supplied as an arguement to the open command.  For example: 

open cs.orst.edu

     Would open a connection to the cs.orst.edu ftp server. 

     Once spawned, barring the possibility of connection-failure -- which does occasionally happen due to network difficulties along the way; the site you are trying to access may be halfway around the world, and take 20 hops to reach -- the remote ftp server will supply a message similar to the one below and prompt you to login: 

ftp cs.orst.edu

Trying cs.orst.edu		<-- This is a Network Message

Connection Established		<-- Success

Connected to cs.orst.edu
220 cs.orst.edu FTP server (Version 5.1 (NeXT 1.0) Thu Apr 29, 1993) ready.
Name (mindvox:member): 		<-- This is the remote "banner" message.

     Once you are at the banner for the machine you are trying to reach, it will prompt you to login.  MOST machines have some sort of limited anonymous ftp set up -- some machines cater specifically this function; in any case, assuming you do not have an individual login, you would type: 

anonymous

     or, with newer versions of ftp, simply:

ftp

     to login.  The server will now prompt you for a password.  If you are using an anonymous login, the remote machine usually requests that you leave your electronic address as the login, so if you were login ID: spud on MindVox, you'd type:

spud@phantom.com

     Since MindVox lives within the phantom domain.  Of course, this is the place where everything becomes kinda shades of grey instead of black and white, since it could be said that it's not anybody's business who you are, and where you're coming from, since it IS an anonymous ftp, and it's certainly your right to remain anonymous and type something like fucku@gotohell.edu.  And in most cases nothing whatsoever will happen since if a server wants the address you are coming in from, it has it anyway, and the system admin at the site will have it writing to a logfile someplace, so it doesn't really matter what you type; unless you reach a really anal-retentive site, in which case if your login ID that is scanned in, does not match the login ID that you type in, the remote system will kick you off. 

     In all of these cases, it doesn't matter too much, since you can always just reconnect and try again, being a wiser person for your errors, and typing whatever the system admin there wants you to type, in order to gain access to his horde of NeAT STuPh!

     Once connected the very first command you want to type is:

bin

     Bin puts the connection into BINary mode, which is what you want, otherwise you may spend 4 hours of your time downloading software, only to discover that it will not unpack back into anything meaningful, because ftp thought it was transferring ascii text files, instead of binary files with control characters in them.

     You don't actually have to type bin right away, you are free to type it at any time -- as long as it happens before you transfer any non-ascii files from the remote host to MindVox; however in practice, its sometimes a long way from here to there, and calls for many pitstops along the way to watch TV, get something to eat and talk on the phone, and by the time you are ready to grab some files, you've forgotten about it, and are about to waste a lot of time. 

LISTING REMOTE DIRECTORIES

     To get a listing of the current directory you are in, type:  

dir

or

ls

     Each one will give you slightly different output.  Experiment with both and find the one you prefer.  ls lists only the filenames, unless given an arguement, whereas dir lists all the available file information to your screen. 

CHANGING REMOTE DIRECTORIES

     To move around in the remote filesystem, you make use of:

cd

     For Change Directory.  You may use partial, or complete pathnames, such as: 

cd spam

or

cd spam/morespam/ilovespam

DOWLOADING FILES

     To start a single file download, you type: 

get <filename> 

     To download multiple files, you type: 

mget <filename> <filename> <filename> <filename> etc . . .

     When using mget you can also use pattern matching.  For example assuming there are two files that you want to download, and their names both begin with the word Pagan.  If the filenames were: 

Pagan_rituals_from_the_Dawn_of_time_01
and
Pagan_rituals_from_the_Dawn_of_time_02

     You could just type: 

mget Pagan*

     And ftp would grab both the files you wanted.  (Along with many files you may NOT have wanted if they begin with the word "pagan."  C'est La'vie.)  FTP uses the asterisk "*" as the wildcard character.

UPLOADING FILES

     The commands used to upload files function identically to the download commands, and are called:

put

and

mput

ENDING A SESSION

     To end an ftp session once you have finished, type:

close

or

bye


FSP (section on) 












Info Tools; 

Archie


Archie is a very useful utility  that provides something analogous to an indexing service for anonymous ftp sites.  What it does is provide a distributed database that you can query about the location of a program that you're searching for.  In other words; it tells you where to find junk.

     A few years ago finding stuff on the internet was a little more complicated.  As the net grew larger and larger, the number of hosts that supported anonymous ftp and allowed people to upload and download files and applications, became quite ponderous and chaotic.  When you're talking about thousands of sites, instead of two dozen, it becomes a major pain in the ass to figure out where anything is.

     So a couple of guys at McGill University in Montreal, named Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and Peter Deutsch saw the problem, and as college students with a lot of spare time on their hands are wont to do, they thought up a pretty neat way to surmount the situation and in a fit of inspired brilliance named their creation Archie.

     What Archie does is two-fold.  Its main task is maintaining a catalogue of a little over 1,000 FTP sites worldwide.  Every night Archie puts on its clothes, slips out of the window into the darkness, and travels the world noting down changes, and new additions in the ftp sites that its keeping an eye on.  Every site in the Archie database is visited at least once a month, some of the sexier and more interesting sites are polled with far greater frequency. 

     The second feature of Archie, is to index this information and make it available to YOU when you want to find something.  There are basically three possible ways to query Archie from within MindVox.

     Since MindVox is running its own Archie client, you can simply type: 

	archie -s filename

     at the main command prompt, where filename denotes the name of the file that you want to find.  This will cause the Vox archie client to initiate contact with a server, and look up the information for you.  The -s in the previous example tells archie to ignore case sensitivey in filenames, so if you typed:  archie -s spam  it would find SPAM, Spam, spam, spaM, etc . . .

     The second, and most common method of searching the Archie database is to telnet to an archie server.  There are usually about half a dozen of these running in north america, and a few are listed below: 

	archie.mcgill.ca
	archie.ans.net
	archie.rutgers.edu
	archie.sura.net
	archie.unl.edu
	archie.funet.fi
	archie.au
	archie.doc.ic.ac.uk

     So for example, you'd type: 

	telnet archie.ans.net

     and when queried for a login ID, type: 

	archie

     Once you are connected you will basically be using one central command called prog.  Prog finds PROGrams that you're looking for.  To give an example of this: 

	prog lard

     Would pause for a little while, and then generate a listing similar to the one below: 

	Host mook.pigsknuckle.edu

	    Location: /pub/fun-with-lard/grease

		FILE -rwxrwxrwx		6660777 Feb 13 21:21   lard.tar.Z
	    Location: /pub/fun-with-lard/grease

		FILE -rw-r--r--            1232 Mar 10 19:21   lard-theopera.Z
	    Location: /pub/fun-with-lard/grease

 		FILE -rw-r--r--           12309 Jun 11 12:12   yuMyUmlard.zip

     Depending on what options you've set, and how many places the file you're looking for is stored, you could end up with several screens of output, similar to the above example.  In this case the program with the word you're searching for in its name, is located at the ftp site mook.pigsknuckle.edu in the sub-directory named /pub/fun-with-lard/grease.

     To retrive the file, you'd initiate an anonymous ftp to that host, as described in the section pertaining to FTP -- by sheer coincidence, also contained in this handy self-referential little guidebook to everything you ever wanted to know about inner peace, and pigs lard.

     The third -- and in most cases -- slowest way to get information from Archie is to send it some mail.  This is mostly for the benefit of sites that are not live on the internet and cannot make use of either telnet or the archie client; since MindVox offers you both, its unlikely that you will ever make use of the mail access method, but if for some reason you want to send letters to archie, this is how to do it:

	send email to:  archie@[select an archie site, from the ones listed]

     In the CONTENTS (NOT THE SUBJECT!), type: 

	prog filename

     And within anywhere from a few minutes, to a couple of hours, archie will mail you back a response, with the same output you'd get from either the client or telnet query.  What you type in the subject line doesn't matter, you can enter something really deep and meaningfully redundant, random junk, or just a carriage return.  No human ever reads it, and archie ignores it.


Gopher

Although Archie is very useful at finding stuff, and ftp and telnet are great -- even essential -- tools used for accessing files and visiting different places; they both work with the assumption that you have some idea of what it is that you want, and then tell you where to find it and give you a means of getting at it.  While that's great, it doesn't lend itself too well to just cruising around and browsing, and seeing what's where, even if you have no real idea of what exactly you want to find, or you just have a vague notion of what its supposed to do or provide you with.

     The way things work on the internet, has very little to do with centralized planning, in fact -- as has been mentioned -- in most cases, it has NOTHING whatsoever to do with any planning.  People developed programs to fill specific needs, and didn't give a lot of thought to the fact that years later there would be dozens, or even hundreds of little programs all over the place that did sometimes similar or identical things to each other, in totally different ways.  In addition to the confusion this situation causes; compounding it is that fact that despite the tremendous power to access information that the net provides, almost everything that runs on the internet is line oriented, and just plain ugly to look at.

     Although this doesn't effect its funtionality, and may even seem all right to people who are used to line oriented interfaces, or running old DOS machines; to the vast majority of the current population who are running Macs, Windoze, OS/2, NeXTSTEP, or other kinds of operating systems and GUI's, it looks like an incredible mess and forces adaption to a somewhat out-dated and clunky paradigm that a lot of people don't want to deal with.

     What Gopher does is essentially provide a menu that lets you scan the net for different types of information, and once you've found what you are looking for, transparently launches an FTP session that lets you download it, without exiting from gopher.  Gopher does all this through a screen-oriented services menu that allows you to pick a selection using a lightbar or arrow, instead of having to type in locations and filenames as you must do with telnet and ftp.

     To access the MindVox gopher, at the main menu, you'd type: 

	gopher

     Gopher would pause for a little while, and give a message along the lines of "Retriving remote directory" and then present you with a menu similar to the one below: 

                    Internet Gopher Information Client v1.11

                     Root gopher server: gopher.tc.umn.edu

 -->  1.  Information About Gopher/
      2.  Computer Information/
      3.  Discussion Groups/
      4.  Fun & Games/
      5.  Internet file server (ftp) sites/
      6.  Libraries/
      7.  News/
      8.  Other Gopher and Information Servers/
      9.  Phone Books/
      10. Search Gopher Titles at the University of Minnesota <?>
      11. Search lots of places at the University of Minnesota  <?>
      12. University of Minnesota Campus Information/


Press ? for Help, q to Quit, u to go up a menu                        Page: 1/1

     From the top level menu you can walk up and down the file structure of the remote site(s) you connect with, by using the arrow keys on your terminal.  In order for this to display properly it is EXTREMELY important that you have your terminal emulation set correctly both on MindVox and your local terminal program that is actually running on your computer.  Vox and your system MUST agree upon what emulation is being used, or instead of getting lightbars, scrolling arrows and full-screen menus; you'll end up with a screen full of random junk.

     The choices that Gopher presents to you can be directories that lead to another sub-level of that Gopher's hierarchy, a document which you can read online, copied over to your home directory, mailed to yourself, or in some cases you can automatically launch an ftp session to retrive the material you want to obtain.

     Whatever level you happen to be on, Gopher has three basic commands, these are: 
	q:  Which quits reading whatever you are currently accessing.

	u:  Which moves you UPwards through the hierarchy and steps backwards through the levels you have traversed to get to wherever you presently are.

	?:  Which gives you further information about your current choices.

     There are also several flags and features that you can toggle once you get more familiar with how Gopher works, to obtain further information about these, just type "?"

     Finally, you can also start Gopher with an arguement, for example: 

	gopher wiretap.spies.com

     Would open a connection to the Spies Gopher server.

     Much like the rest of the Internet, GopherSpace roughly doubles in size each year.  As more and more databases and libraries are added, it begins to resemble the state of anonymous ftp before the advent of Archie.  Naturally, for this too, there is a solution.  And her name is . . .


Veronica

Veronica is a brunette, her father is really wealthy, and for a comic book character aimed at pre-teens, she's kinda hot.  At the present time there is still a relatively high level of harmony in the information navigation universe, since Reggie hasn't found out about all this yet.

     Aside from being one of the two chicks in the Archie comics, Veronica also stands for:  Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.  Which is yet another one of those not-so-subtle examples of why people shouldn't spend THAT MUCH time with their computer, but yah know . . . 

     Veronica is sort of the next layer up from Gopher.  The main problem with Gopher -- and actually, ALL of the first generation information navigation tools -- being that you are presented with nearly-endless menus of stuff to scroll through, but not necessarily any of the stuff that YOU are looking for RIGHT NOW. 

     What Veronica does is index the titles of several hundred Gopher sites.  This is similar to what Archie does for FTP servers, down to the current limitation of only indexing FILENAMES and words in TITLES, but not being able to scan through actual content.  This makes Veronica only as effective as the administrator of the Gopher server, and his choice of descriptive or oblique, file names.

     At the present time there is only one experimental Veronica server, located at the University of Nevada, and run by Steve Foster and Fred Barrie, who are the developers of the project.  The only client in existence runs under NeXTSTEP; which is cool since I like NeXTSTEP a lot, and everybody on earth should use it.  Its not-so-cool since most people on the planet are currently running Windoze or Macs, and hook into the internet through a terminal program anyway. 

     Assuming you don't have a NeXT and aren't running a SLIP or PPP link into MindVox (hello to the 2 people doing this); you access Veronica through Gopher itself.  Type: 

	gopher

     From the menu presented pick: 

	 -->  8.  Other Gopher and Information Servers/

     And from this sub-menu, select: 

	 -->  2.  Search titles in Gopherspace using veronica/

     Once connected, what Veronica does is allow you to enter a search request for whatever information you are looking for.  Veronica will take a break, fix her makeup, come back and present you with a Gopher-like menu, but instead of the usual Gopher sites, it will be arranged based upon the materials that have matched your keyword search.

     You may then proceed to access any or all of this information, in the way you'd usually use Gopher, copying, mailing, or downloading the documents that you want to obtain, without having to worry about where they're located, or what layer of menus you're accessing them from. 

WAIS

WAIS stands for Wais Area Information Servers, yet another example of a Front-End style of application that attempts to help you access widely scattered pieces of information that match a given set of criteria. 

     With WAIS you are presented a single unified interface, that allows you to search through hundreds, or even thousands of different databases, covering a vast variety of topics.  With the WAIS client you don't need to spend any time figuring out where the database is located, or how to sift through its contents once you have managed to access it.  You just tell the client program what it is that you're searching for, and then it'll pause for a little while; consult a cosmic Ouija_board Object, and get back to you with a listing of documents, ranked according to how closely any one of them has matched your search criteria.  

     To start the WAIS application on MindVox, type: 

	swais

     Which stands for Simple WAIS, and once started will present you with a menu similar to the one below: 

SWAIS                           Source Selection                    Sources:
427  #            Server                          Source                   Cost
001:   [ bloat.media.mit.edu]  Aesop-Fables                                Free
002:   [ ftp.cs.colorado.edu]  aftp-cs-colorado-edu                        Free
003:   [nostromo.oes.orst.ed]  agricultural-market-news                    Free
004:   [     sunsite.unc.edu]  alt-sys-sun                                 Free
005:   [    archive.orst.edu]  alt.drugs                                   Free
006:   [    wais.oit.unc.edu]  alt.gopher                                  Free
007:   [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu]  alt.sys.sun                                 Free
008:   [    wais.oit.unc.edu]  alt.wais                                    Free
009:   [     munin.ub2.lu.se]  amiga_fish_contents                         Free
010:   [     quake.think.com]  Applications-Navigator                      Free
011:   [      132.183.190.21]  Arabidopsis-BioSci                          Free
012:   [weeds.mgh.harvard.ed]  Arabidopsis_thaliana_Genome                 Free
013:   [       ftp.tex.ac.uk]  archaeological_computing                    Free
014:   [    archive.orst.edu]  archie-orst.edu                             Free
015:   [           archie.au]  archie.au-amiga-readmes                     Free
016:   [           archie.au]  archie.au-ls-lRt                            Free
017:   [           archie.au]  archie.au-mac-readmes                       Free
018:   [           archie.au]  archie.au-pc-readmes                        Free


<space> selects, w for keywords, arrows move, <return> searches, q quits, or ?

     Each number represents a different database that you may access, the notations that are contained between the brackets are the geographic locations of the server being queried, in internet-address format.  The line immediately following the brackets is the general type of information contained online, and the final heading is Cost, since professional-quality commercial-use WAIS servers are starting to pop up, and several experimental sites currently charge for their information. 

     The controls for WAIS are: 

	K: (Capital K) which moves you forward a page.
	J: (Capital J) which moves you backwards a page.
	[space]: selects the Database that your lightbar is on.
	w: Searches for a given set of keywords
	q: Quits out of WAIS
	?: Supplies you with further information
	And, the arrow keys let you scroll back and forth through the listing.

     WAIS's strength is that it empowers you to search through a constantly increasing variety of databases.  The downside is that you need to toggle -- using your [SPACEBAR] -- the topics that you want to do a search on.  This means that you presently CANNOT just tell WAIS to search for SPAM, in all its records; you need to scroll to the databases you want queried, and then give WAIS its magic word or phrase, and it'll come back in a little while with a sub-menu that is nearly identical to its main menu, that shows you the selections you can read or download, according to how close WAIS thinks they matched with your request.

     Although this is pretty neat, and if you have something specific that you need found yesterday, it'll save you a lot of time, WAIS is still a little less than perfect.  By forcing you to manually scroll through its huge databases, it tends to make too many demends upon you, the user, in terms of where its supposed to look for what you want it to find.  As its set up now, WAIS basically provides a central repository of documents, it doesn't really do such an effective job of searching all of them just yet.

     As usual, they know, and they're working on it <insert emoticon here>.

WWW

The WordWide Web was created by a handful of guys at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva.  It's a very neat, yet ethereal project, that is only very-tangentially, semi-partially complete. 

     The WorldWide Web is the kind of thing you tend to think of when you're in a room with some of your friends, and its getting to be around midnight, and you've pretty much smoked everything that can be smoked, so you have a big silly grin on your face and everything is really cool, and the net is this glowing, throbbing, living thing that fly's all around us, and contains every fact that ever existed and they all swirl around in 24bit color as they swoop down in kamikazie runs in an attempt to imprint themselves upon your consciousness and gain a moment's recognition.   And gosh, wouldn't it be neat to collect all facts, and link them together by content and context, instead of using an index, and wait . . . there's already this thing called Hypertext, so lets use that. 

     WWW is a REALLY COOL place to browse around, and see where you can go, its kind of like a blurry gopher, which doesn't have absolute boundaries, but its wider and flatter and emits snuffling, chortling sort of sounds, and by now I've undoubtly pissed off the really serious people reading this, so lemme point out here that the Web is a great place to browse, but as of yet, it isn't too useful for any particular purpose.

     If you know exactly what you're looking for, you'd be better off using Gopher or WAIS; on the other hand if you want to open an encyclopedia type of database, that lets you travel through it based on content and relationships, which form links to other related documents . . . WWW is a good place to visit. 

     Unfortunately for you -- at the present time at least -- Web clients are line-oriented, non-obvious, and, being realistic, while its an extremely powerful system with a lot of potential, the clients are pretty ugly to look at and deal with.  Creating an un-appealing user-interface, would seem to be in direct conflict with a system whose main purpose is browsing.  

     Enough of my complaints, to access WWW just type: 

	www

     And you'll be presented with a menu like the one below: 

                                                            Overview of the Web
                               GENERAL OVERVIEW
                                       
   There is no "top" to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points
   of view. If you have no other bias, here are some places to start:
   
  by Subject[1]          A classification by subject of interest. Incomplete
                         but easiest to use.
                         
  by Type[2]             Looking by type of service (access protocol, etc) may
                         allow to find things if you know what you are looking
                         for.
                         
  About WWW[3]           About the World-Wide Web global information sharing
                         project
                         
Starting somewhere else

   To use a different default page, perhaps one representing your field of
   interest, see  "customizing your home page"[4].
   
1-6, Up, <RETURN> for more, Quit, or Help: 

     You move through the Webs by typing the numbers in brackets "[]'s" next to the topics you're interested in.  Type U or Up to move up a level, Help for basic help with the commands, and Q or Quit to leave the Web.


CONCLUSION
----------

This concludes a brief tutorial on the essential Information Navigation tools that are currently in wide use on the Internet.  This list is by no means complete, nor does it touch upon systems that are currently in development or beta-test, such as:  Jughead (sorta, kinda, something like Veronica), Alex, Essence, Mosaic, Netfind, Netserv, and Prospero. 

     In general, Information Navigation program development is moving towards a far-more integrated, and  simple-to-query universal access system, wherein you will be able to easily manipulate and find, whatever pieces of information you want, just by giving a brief description to a Front-End, or Agent.  Everything else that occurs after that point will be largely irrelevent to you, unless you are interested in knowing how it works. 

     The key point being, you won't HAVE to know how it works, anymore than someone typing in a document on a Macintosh needs to understand the technical details of System 7, or the design principles of CRT's.  





Utils:  finger, dig, whois, ping, nslookup

Further reading, more sources
