MacFormat 1995 April/macformat-023.iso/Shareware City/Info/internet-lessons/Internet Lessons/Internet Lessons.rsrc/TEXT_168.txt

Text File | 1994-11-28 | 9.7 KB | 216 lines

BBS.OIT.UNC.EDU
Telnet to BBS.OIT.UNC.EDU or 152.2.22.80.
Type launch at the login message.
It's a must. Not only can you read Usenet Newsfeeds, but you can use
LibTel, a scripted telnet gateway to access both US and international
libraries plus such things as Data Research Associates Library of Congress
catalog, the Ham Radio Call Book, the National Science Foundation, the
Weather Server, Webster's dictionary and thesaurus, and more.

Remote Access to Files (FTP)

FTP or File Transfer Protocol is what to use to retrieve a text file, software,
or other item from a remote host. Normal practice is to ftp to the host you
want and login as "anonymous". Some sites use the password "guest" while
others require that you put in your network address as the password. Some
popular ftp sites follow:

SUMEX-AIM
This archive at Stanford (sumex-aim.stanford.edu or 36.44.0.6) houses a
plethora of Macintosh applications, utilities, graphics and sound files.

SIMTEL20
(simtel20.army.mil or 192.88.110.20) at the White Sands Missile Range in
New Mexico contains a similar archive software for MS-DOS computers.

An FTP visit to the Network Service Center at nnsc.nsf.net (128.89.1.178)
is a gold mine of documents and training materials on net use. See further
information on this in the "Resources for Learning More" section of this
article.

Project Gutenberg
The primary goal of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and
distribution of electronic text.  They hope to have a trillion etexts in
distribution by the end of 2001.

Some of the many texts available now include Alice in Wonderland, Peter
Pan, Shakespeare, Paradise Lost and other texts in the public domain.
Many of these texts are available from:
ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (128.174.201.12) /pub/etext92 [for 1992 releases]
or /pub/etext/etext91 [for 1991 releases]
/pub/etext/articles [for Project Gutenberg articles and newsletters].
They are also available from quake.think.com (192.31.181.1); /pub/etext,
and from many other sites.

For more info:
Michael S. Hart, Director
Project Gutenberg
National Clearinghouse for Machine Readable Texts
Illinois Benedictine College
5700 College Road
Lisle, Illinois 60532-0900
BITNET: HART@UIUCVMD
INTERNET: [e-mail]

Travel Agents: Archie, Gopher, Veronica, WAIS, Worldwide Web and
More

There is so much information on the net, it's impossible to know where
everything is, or even how to begin looking. Fortunately, some
computerized "agents" are in development to help sort through the massive
data libraries on the net.

Archie
Peter Deutsch, of McGill's Computing Centre, describes the archie server
concept, which allows users to ask a question once yet search many
different hosts for files of interest.

"The archie service is a collection of resource discovery tools that together
provide an electronic directory service for locating information in an
Internet environment. Originally created to track the contents of
anonymous ftp archive sites, the archie service is now being expanded to
include a variety of other online directories and resource listings."

"Currently, archie tracks the contents of over 800 anonymous FTP archive
sites containing some 1,000,000 files throughout the Internet. Collectively,
these files represent well over 50 Gigabytes (50,000,000,000 bytes) of
information, with additional information being added daily. Anonymous ftp
archive sites offer software, data and other information which can be
copied and used without charge by anyone with connection to the Internet."

"The archie server automatically updates the listing information from each
site about once a month, ensuring users that the information they receive is
reasonably timely, without imposing an undue load on the archive sites or
network bandwidth."

Unfortunately the archie server at McGill is currently out of service. Other
sites are: archie.ans.net (USA [NY]) archie.rutgers.edu (USA [NJ])
archie.sura.net (USA [MD]) archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe)
archie.au (Australia/New Zealand) archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great
Britain/Ireland)

Info from: UNIX Support Group
Computing Centre
McGill University
Room 200
Burnside Hall
805 Sherbrooke Street West
Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 2K6
514/398-3709
[e-mail]

Internet  Gopher
A gopher (or go-fer) is someone who fetches necessary items from many
locations.

Login as gopher after you telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy
having a computer do all the work for you. Almost. Gopher is still in
experimental mode at many gopherized sites. Still, it is one of the best
ways to locate information on and in the Internet.

Besides archie, the gopher at consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and
games, humor, libraries (including reference books such as the Hacker's
Dictionary, Roget's 1911 Thesaurus, and the CIA World Fact Book),
gateways to other US and foreign gophers, news, and gateways to other
systems.

VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized
Archives.

Very new on the scene is VERONICA. Here is some information from
Steve Foster about it.

"Veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menus in the
entire gopher web.  As Archie is to ftp archives, Veronica is to
gopherspace. Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you directly to
the data source. Imagine an Archie search that lets you select the data, not
just the host sites, directly from a menu.  Because Veronica is accessed
through a gopher client, it is easy to use, and gives access to all types of
data supported by the gopher protocol."

"Veronica was designed as a response to the problem of resource discovery
in the rapidly-expanding gopher web. Frustrated comments in the net news-
groups have recently reflected the need for such a service. Additional
motivation came from the comments of naive gopher users, several of
whom assumed that a simple-touse service would provide a means to find
resources 'without having to know where they are.'"

"The result of a Veronica search is an automatically-generated gopher
menu, customized according to the user's keyword specification. Items on
this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers.  These are functional
gopher items, immediately accessible via the gopher client I just double-
click to open directories, read files, or perform other searches -- across
hundreds of gopher servers. You need never know which server is actually
involved in filling your request for information. Items that are appear
particularly interesting can be saved in the user's bookmark list."

"Notice that these are NOT full-text searches of data at gopher-server sites,
just as Archie does not index the contents of ftp sites, but only the names of
files at those sites.  Veronica indexes the TITLES on all levels of the
menus, for most gopher sites in the Internet.  258 gophers are indexed by
Veronica on Nov. 17, 1992;  we have discovered over 500 servers and will
index the full set in the near future. We hope that Veronica will encourage
gopher administrators to use very descriptive titles on their menus."

"To try Veronica, select it from the 'Other Gophers' menu on Minnesota's
gopher server (consultant.micro.umn.edu), or point your gopher at:
Name=Veronica (search menu items in most of GopherSpace)
Type=1
Port=70
Path=1/Veronica Host=futique.scs.unr.edu"

"Veronica is an experimental service, developed by Steve Foster and Fred
Barrie at University of Nevada.  As we expect that the load will soon
outgrow our hardware, we will distribute the Veronica service across other
sites in the near future."

"Please address comments to:   [e-mail]"

Is this the new world order of automated librarianship?

WAIS
Wide Area Information Servers (pronounced ways) allows users to get
information from a variety of hosts by means of a "client". The user tells
the client, in plain English, what to look for out in dataspace. The client
then searches various WAIS servers around the globe. The user tells the
client how relevant each hit is, and the client can be sent out on the same
quest again and again to find new documents. Client software is available
for many different types of computers.

WAIStation is an easy to use Macintosh implementation of a WAIS client.
It can be downloaded from think.com as well as a self-running
MediaTracks demo of WAIStation in action. Kahle also moderates a
thoughtful WAIS newsletter and discussion group, often speculating about
the future of libraries and librarians.

Info from: Brewster Kahle, Project Leader
Wide Area Information Servers
Thinking Machines Corporation
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
415/329-9300 x228
[e-mail]

WorldWideWeb
Tim Berners-Lee describes the Web this way: "The WWW project merges
the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but
powerful global information system. The WWW world consists of
documents, and links.  Indexes are special documents which, rather than
being read, may be searched.  The result of such a search is another
('virtual') document containing links to the documents found.  The Web
contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are
hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places
within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look
similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.
To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or
she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other
search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire
world of data."

Info from: Tim Berners-Lee
WorldWideWeb project
CERN
1211 Geneva 23,
 Switzerland
Tel: [phone]  FAX:[phone]
email:[e-mail]