¢¢The Net¢-------¢¢If you are a regular reader of the News-Disk, then no doubt you will have heard about the net. Dean often pulls things off the net in order to fill up the News-Disk, in fact some of the earlier issues of News-Disk were made up almost entirely of articles and letters taken from the net due to a serious lack of contributions from readers (come on, write an article for the News-Disk, it isn't that difficult!). But how many of you actualy know what the net is? If you have downloaded this issue from the archive (or anywhere else for that matter) then you obviously do, but this article is mainly intended for all those subscribers who receive their copies of News-Disk on floppies, who probably don't know. Even if you do have net access you might like to read on and hear about my experiences on the net concerning the Atari.¢¢I decided to write this article in order to share my experiences with the rest of you, since until a few months back I didn't know about the net either, but when I started University not so long ago, I was suddenly thrown into the middle of all this, all of a sudden I had Internet access. I don't claim to be an expert on any of this, so there may be some mistakes in this text, therefore if I do make any mistakes then feel free to correct me!¢¢O.K. so what exactly is the net? Well, that is a very difficult question to answer. Basicaly the net is a lot of computers all connected together in such a way that you can send information from any one of them to any other one (in theory at least!). But the net isn't just that, if it were then it would be a very boring place. The net is also made up of people, and it is the huge number of people on the net that make it a very interesting place indeed. When I mention computers here I'm not talking about micros (although you can gain access using a micro), I'm talking about huge mainframes. Just to give you an idea of the size of these computers, let me tell you about the one that I have access to: it is called Robin (after Robin Hood - well it is in Nottingham), and it has around 128 Megabytes of RAM connected to it, which is a HUGE amount of memory. Think of your Atari sitting in front of you, it probably has around 64 or 128K (maybe even 8 or 16K with a 400 or 800!) and this might seem like quite a lot of memory, but the think how big 128M is, that's 1000 times more than a 130XE!!! The processors in these computers also run very fast. Robin runs at around 40 mips (mips=millions of instructions per second), it is very difficult to compare the speed of these computers with a micro, but your Atari runs at around 2.178 Mhz (1.79 if it is an NTSC), that's over 2 million cycles a second. The quickest machine code instruction takes up 2 machine cycles and the slowest takes 7. Taking the worst case this gives around 311,000 instructions per second. Of course it is not as simple as that and there are a lot of other factors involved, you can hardly compare the commands used in a mainframe to those used by a 6502 Atari, but this should at least give you a feel for how big these computers really are. Then of course there's the hard disk space to consider, a mainframe can typicaly have a couple of Gigabytes worth of space on it 1G = 1,000M = 1,000,000K!!!! But mainframes have to be big since they have to be able to support several users conneted to them at the same time, and run loads of programs in parallel.¢¢¢e-mail¢------¢¢This was the first type of net access that I came across and that I used. E-mail stands for electronic-mail and it allows you to send messages to other people at other places. I like to think of it as a kind of cross between a telephone call and a letter. It is as convenient as a letter, and almost as quick as a telephone call. If the person you are sending a message to happens to be logged on to their computer at that particular time, then you could get an answer back in a couple of minutes, otherwise the message will be sitting there waiting for them next time they log on. The way it works is a bit like ordinary mail (often called snail-mail on the net). Each person has a unique address which tells the computer who they are and where they are. For example my address is rje@cs.nott.ac.uk which means:¢¢rje - my user name¢cs - computer science¢nott - Nottingham¢ac - academic¢uk - United Kingdom¢¢If you look elsewhere in this issue you might be able to find Dean's address as well [It's djg0@aber.ac.uk - Ed.], and you should be able to see that it follows the same pattern as mine. The mailing software can read this address and send it to the right person at the right place [sometimes!! - Ed.]. The interesting thing about e-mail, is that you can send mail to anybody else who has an access to e-mail as long as you know their address. Even if they are on the other side of the world it is not unreasonable to expect an answer the next day. This makes it easy to communicate with other Atarians world wide. In practice it doesn't always run that smoothly, but you get the general idea.¢¢¢Newsnet¢-------¢¢So far all this has not had much to do with Atari, but this is where all that changes. The Newsnet is a bit like e-mail in that you can send messages and other such things to other people, but instead of going to just one person like e-mail does it goes to everybody who has access to Newsnet the world over. There are obviously a huge amount of messages sent, so the Newsnet is divided up into newsgroups, with each group concentrating on a particular subject. There are a massive number of newsgroups, covering just about every subject under the sun, and if it isn't there, and you can muster together enough support from other users, then you can probably start your own newsgroup. There are so many groups that it would be impossible for you to read them all (nor would you want to), even if you did nothing else for the rest of your life you still wouldn't be able to get through all of them [He's right! - Ed.]. What's more the groups are constantly updated as people post new messages all the time. Just to give you a taste of all this, I'll describe which newsgroups I read (when I have time that is) in reverse order:¢¢alt.tv.red-drawf - which is all about the Red Drawf T.V. show on BBC2 and other related things.¢¢alt.fan.douglas-adams - which is about this author's book and other connected items (like towels and the number 42).¢¢rec.games.video.classic - for the Atari 2600, 5200 and 7800's¢¢but I've saved the best for last¢¢comp.sys.atari.8bit - which, of course, is all about the good old 8-bits.¢¢There are hundreds (thousands?) of other newsgroups, and just listing them all would take up a major chunk of the News-Disk so I'm not even going to try. [A full listing is several inches thick of printer paper!! - Ed.].¢¢So what is discussed in comp.sys.atari.8bit?¢¢Well, just about anything concerning Atari 8-bits really, just take a look through past issues of News-Disk if you want a sample. Anything from Hardware to Software, upgrades, projects, etc. And since anybody with full Newsnet access can post messages, it is a very interesting place. No matter what the subject is, chances are that there will be someone at the other end who knows something about it. Just think about it, lots of friendly people willing to help, all talking about Atari! There are even one or two ex-Atari engineers who were around when the 8-bits were being built, who occasionaly chip in, as well as other 'important' people in the Atari scene. All in all very interesting.¢¢¢The Archive¢-----------¢¢But the fun doesn't end there. On top of all this there is also the atari.archive, which is a computer where lots of Atari PD software and text about Atari are stored. For example, all the issues of News-Disk are stored there. All this can then be transferred across to your computer and downloaded and run on your Atari.¢¢The process involved is rather tricky, and you soon learn that Murphy rules supreme: 'if anything can go wrong it will do'. To illustrate this point let me tell you about what happened when I tried to complete my collection of News-Disk (I was missing issues 3,4,5 and 6).¢¢Well, after a lot of help from Dean, via e-mail (and I do really mean a Lot with a capital L - thanks Dean), I finally managed to understand most of the theory behind it all, and then it was just a case of putting it into practice. ¢Basicaly what you have to do is to first transfer whatever file you want to get from the archive onto a PC, and despite the fact that the atari.archive is a few thousand miles away on the other side of the Atlantic, this actualy turns out to be the easiest part of the process. Once you have got the file onto a PC, by using a program called UTIL, you can write the file onto a disk in Atari Double Density format, which can then be read on your Atari with a double density drive, however, in order to save memory and transfer time, the files tend to be compressed, so you also need to have some way of uncompressing them on your Atari.¢¢With all this in mind I set out to try an accomplish my goal of completing my News-Disk collection. Dean very kindly sent me a copy of UTIL and a couple of programs to uncompress the files once I had got them onto my Atari. So the first thing I do is to log onto the archive, the best time for doing this is during off-peak hours, to do it at weekends is probably the best idea. I actually managed to get in first time (which is not always the case, because there are only a limited number of connections, and it is not unusual to find that they are all busy), I then managed to successfully transfer issue 3 across onto the PC. I then saved a copy of this onto a PC formatted floppy disk so that if anything did happen to go wrong I always have a copy so that I can try again. Next I transferred UTIL over onto the PC, and that was where things started to go wrong, since despite the fact that Dean had told me it was VERY important to select a binary mode transfer, I forgot all about this. The result was that when I ran the program, the whole thing crashed, horribly. So now I have to find a way of re-starting the computer, then I realise that this PC hasn't got a RESET key, neither does it have a BREAK key, and there is a sign on the wall saying "Do not under any circumstances switch the computers off".¢¢¢After a trip to the enquiries desk, I discovered that to reset the PC you need to press the CONTOL, ALT and DELETE keys togther (now that is really logical - sarc). After that I managed to get UTIL onto the PC and run it successfully, and while I was at it I saved a copy onto a PC formatted disk, to save me the trouble of having to transfer it again (or so I thought at the time). My next problem then was getting to grips with Util, the help screen isn't exactly very clear, but after some guess work and a lot of experimenting I got it to work! I then transferred issue 3 of News-Disk without any major problems, and the same goes for number 5. Number 4 gave me some trouble, since the PC disk upon which I had saved all the files I had transferred across, including Util suddenly went bad on me, for apparantly no reason ('if anything can go wrong.....'), which meant that I had to start again transferring UTIL across and downloading issue 4 again. However I got it in the end!¢¢But it was issue 6 that caused me the most problems. It just so happens that issue 6 is stored in a different format to the others, and this was reflected in the extender used, all the other News-Disks were stored as .ARC files (i.e. ISSUE1.ARC, ISSUE2.ARC, etc), but for some reason issue 6 was saved as ISSUE6.DCM. [Becuase the ARC file is bigger than the usual 64K Ramdisk on the Atari, so unarcing it would be a pain. Using Diskcomm would make it easier - Ed.]. I wondered a bit about this at first, but didn't think too much of it. However Dean had forgotten to tell me that in order to convert this file I needed to use a program called DISKCOMM on my Atari rather than the UNARC program I had used for all of the other files. [You didn't ask me! - Ed.]. Well after a lot of head scratching I managed to work it out in the end, but that wasn't the end of it. For some reason UTIL kept on 'missing' sectors on the disk, so that when I had transferred the file onto an Atari disk there were half a dozen sectors missing, I tried it again and the same thing happened, but with a different set of sectors. In the end I made 4 copies of the file (that way I could make sure that I had at least one copy of each sector) and, by using a sector editor, I patched up one good copy of the file. And so, after a lot of work, I was finally able to complete my collection of news-disk. [ Util is an absolute pain to use. It's flakey at best, easily crashes, has no error trapping, misses sectors, and lots of other things! - Ed. ].¢¢Well I hope that you have enjoyed this article, all my experiences with these other computers have really made me appreciate my Atari all the more! The main reason for me writing this article was really to 'enlighten' those of you (who like me a few months back), didn't know anything about the net! If you ever get a chance to take a look at the net first hand, then don't pass it by, you will probably find it most interesting!¢¢Just as a footnote, this article was written on my Atari, uploaded and then posted to Dean over the net!¢¢Thanks must go to Dean Garraghty for all the help he provided in helping me complete the above process - Thanks!¢¢Raphael Espino¢rje@cs.nott.ac.uk¢¢Editors notes:¢¢If it was only so smooth! The net is a huge and powerful beast, but it rarely works properly. Computers crash, comms lines die, mail goes into black holes and never comes out, news goes missing, newsfeeds die or keep news back for weeks, the archive can go down, or FTP links to the archive can die or act stupid, the BART system for file transfer doesn't really work properly, and never has!, and lots of other things!¢¢E-mail is usually the biggest pain. Mail can very easily bounce when going to some sites. This is usually the site at the other end acting thick and pretending the user doesn't exist. You only have to type one character of the address wrong, and it will bounce. Also, not all email addresses are as simple as Raphael's and mine. Some have % signs in, and these nearly always cause a pain. And if you're on an X400 line rather than X25 then you'll have a REALLY stupid looking address with lots of numbers in it! Also, we have an added problem in the UK. We use the JANET network, which handles mail a little differently to Internet. Our addresses are reversed, which won't work if you tried these from Internet. All just adds to the pain!¢¢FTP links to the archive can also cause headaches. They rarely work well. The comms link over to the U.S. from the U.K is heavily congested with Internet traffic, and it is very slow and unreliable. You usually have to download things a few times to get a working version.¢¢The Newsnet is terrible in some UK sites. It can take weeks for messages to get to you. PAIN!¢¢Actually, anyone with a modem can get onto Internet. There are some open phone connections on to JANET which allow you to connect onto American systems such as Cleveland Freenet for free. It is very very complicated and expensive in phone bills though!¢
