A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/guides/sat13asc/sat13asc.asc

Text File | 1996-05-06 | 163.4 KB | 3,299 lines

saturn


a beginner's guide to using the internet
at rowan college of new jersey

version 1.3, march 1994 (e-text version)





































                                   by kyle cassidy
                                   office of academic computing
                                   rowan college of new jersey
                                   ([e-mail])









Copyright (c) 1994 Kyle Cassidy

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this document throughout
cyberspace provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to modify and distribute this document provided that this copyright notice
remains intact and the document is clearly labeled as "modified."

You may freely distribute this manual only on the condition that you don't sell it for a profit. Feel
free to charge for duplicating costs -- the paper is yours, the information on it belongs to me and
I'm casting it onto the winds of cyberspace. Nuff said.

This text was composed on WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386SX/25 machine, processor by Cyrix.
Though I suppose if I was adequately enthusiastic about this project, I would have done the whole
thing on the VAX with the VMS typesetting utility, DSR (I may be dumb, but i am not silly.) All the
typos and layout inconsistencies are (ala) mine. If you see one, I'd be grateful if you'd point it out
to me. TNX 1.0E6.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (you can skip this part)
     Writing something like this is a lot like climbing a mountain. (Although to be completely
honest I have never climbed a mountain, so more likely than not I am embellishing somewhat.)
When you finish, you expect a press conference to be held where AP reporters in houndstooth
fedoras ask: "How did you do it?" "Did you hear voices at the highest altitudes?" and invariably
some smart aleck will want to know about snow leopards. However, you come to discover that
when what you have accomplished is a manual for the VMS operating system, people tend to look
upon your success as less of a mountain and more of something to swat at flies with if it is concise
and a device to prop children up to the dinner table with if comprehensive. Oh well. Somewhere
in the history of the universe, a VMS manual-writer must have angered the gods ─ it would appear
that this ennui is their revenge.
     Throughout the production of this text I have drawn upon the technical expertise of various
personages whom I need to thank: klein@mars, berman@saturn, daro@saturn, sysop@elan,
dries@gboro, [e-mail], [e-mail]; cimprich@saturn who gave me the
go-ahead and supported me in this venture ─ even to the extent of respecting my opinions and
abilities, undergraduate grunt that I am; beta-testers, del, halll, & greenspan (all @saturn) who
pointed out various egregious evils throughout; Karen M. who loaned me her Sisters of Mercy
bootlegs, without which I would not have had the stamina nor the discipline to finish this; & of
course, [e-mail]

Published by the Office of Academic Computing, Rowan College of New Jersey, Glassboro NJ
08028. Bugs and flames to [e-mail].                       Table of Contents




What exactly am I doing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   1
Some Questions You May Have About the Internet . . . . . .   3
USENET News. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   8
Electronic Mail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  20
FINGER and TALK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  28
File Transfer Protocol: FTP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  32
TELNET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  42
EVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  45
IRC. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  51
The VMS Operating System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  56
How To Call SATURN From Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  61
ARCHIE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  62
Getting Files To Your Home Computer. . . . . . . . . . . .  67
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  69
Appendix A: How to Type Like a Cyberdweeb. . . . . . . . .  71
Appendix B: Computer Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  75
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  83
INDEX. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  85









          The VAX, a design now entering its second decade, continues
          to revolutionize the computer industry and business. It's the
          Porsche 911 of computers; the VAX architecture is a rich and
          timeless design.

                         ─ David W. Bynon Mastering VMS, 1-24


              What exactly am I doing?







     So you've heard about this Internet thing, from a friend, in the newspaper, from that
spiffy cutting-edge publication Venue, something like that and you want to look around (call
it "surfing the Net" you'll sound sophisticated) and see what's out there.... This is not a
problem. Rowan is in the habit of making it very easy to get an Internet account. Many
other colleges restrict access or charge for accounts, so consider yourselves lucky campers.
One of the computers which handles a good deal of student accounts is called SATURN.
This document will help you to manoeuver through the Internet on the computer SATURN.
     One of the lamentable things you are about to discover, is that in utilizing the
Internet through SATURN, you are using the VAX/VMS operating system. VMS is about
as user friendly as a gangland slaying. If you become frustrated, don't feel bad. Many
experienced computer users would rather shove flaming sticks into their eyes than use
VMS. On the up side, you don't have to know much about the VAX to use the Internet.
This document will take you step by step through several aspects of Internetting from the
VAX terminals.


BACKGROUND
     Sometime around the fall of 1992, I expressed an interest in creating a FAQ
(Internet jargon for "Frequently Asked Questions") file for using the Internet with
SATURN, the VAX run by the Office of Academic Computing. I'd been using it for a few
months, and although it was fun, it was esoteric as well. I'd been filling my little notebooks
with useful junk and periodically picking the brain of A.C.'s local VMS guru (a dubious
distinction), Bruce Klein. Bruce finally got tired of all my dumb questions and gave me a
shelf of VMS manuals (the possession of which may also prove to be a dubious
distinction). The idea to create a FAQ fell upon stony ground. A few months then passed
and for some reason Internet usage on campus exploded (accounts more than doubled.)
Suddenly everybody seemed to be using SATURN, sometimes one could find ten or twelve
users on it at a time (presumably most of them were doing Internet stuff, since there's not
a whole heck of a lot of recreational uses for VMS (There is Galactic Trader we may or
may not discuss that later.)) Jack Cimprich, the head of Academic Computing asked Bruce
if he could write up some sort of users guide for the VAX. Apparently Bruce would rather
drink lye than write a user manual for VMS, but he remembered that I had wanted to do
it a few months back....

     What you have here is not a comprehensive guide, but hopefully it will be adequate
to get a user to the point where he or she can begin to intuitively discover what has been
left out.



A NOTE ON THE TEXT
     Throughout the text, lines and characters that are printed on or by the computer are
shown in the ugly looking courier type font. Lines and characters that represent what the
user is entering on the computer are shown in the bold courier type font. This should help
you distinguish input from output. Also, things which take place on the computer screen
are indented. USENET news groups are printed in bold. Program names are shown in ALL
CAPS throughout the text. Though I tend to use them arbitrarily, VT-220's sometimes
distinguish between the [return] key and the [enter] key (those keyboards will have both)
I have no idea why. If I have deviated from this anywhere in the text, I assure you it is
accidental and not a malicious design to trip you up. I'd appreciate it if you'd point out any
inconsistencies.


BEFORE YOU START
     If you're having trouble at the start you might want to glance over the chapter on
using the EVE text editor since using the Net you and EVE will be running into one
another rather frequently. Also, there is a useful glossary at the end of this document that
might help you understand some terms you're not familiar with.


               Some Questions You May
Have About the Internet








Question #1: "What is the Internet?" A good question, and a very difficult one. In the most
     physical terms there is no Internet. There is no big white room filled with blinking
     lights and technicians and bubbling liquid nitrogen tanks to which we can point and
     say "this is the Internet!" rather than being a single entity, the Internet is a group of
     computers which span the globe and are connected to one another like a giant
     electronic octopus. And likewise, there is no one driving the Internet, there is no
     "president," no board of directors. The ruling force of "the Net" is nothing short of
     sheer anarchy. (This you will soon discover has it's pluses and minuses.) The
     million armed octopus has a million brains, each dictatorially responsible for its own
     arm and each with very little influence over anything else. Through this connection
     the computers can share information.  This may sound innocuous enough at first,
     until you realize that there are uncounted millions of computers connected to the
     Net, several hundred here at Rowan alone.

Question #2: "How do I get an Internet account?" To use the Internet, you have to have
     an account, which is also your e-mail address. Just see Bruce Klein in Academic
     Computing, which is also in the Robinson building. (If Bruce isn't there, someone
     else can point you to the appropriate paperwork.) Bruce will do some wizard stuff
     and say something like "You're set." You're set.

Question #3: "Just where do I get on the Internet?" Well, for right now, the easiest place
     is in Robinson room 311, the open lab, you've probably been in there and probably
     seen that row of crusty looking things in the back of the room, strange computers
     with ugly green or amber screens, no disk drives. Just what are they? Well, they are
     not computers, they are video terminals (VT's) made by Digital Equipment
     Corporation, hence, they are known as DEC terminals (learn something new every
     day). They are pretty much exactly what they appear to be, screens and keyboards,
     they are connected to a big computer called SATURN which is somewhere ELSE.
     (As for where it is, I'll leave that for you to discover.) It is this computer which
     resides ELSEWHERE that is connected to the Internet.

Question #4: "What is SATURN and why use it?" SATURN is a VAX 4000, also made by
     the Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time of its purchase it cost about a
     hundred thousand dollars. It sells for substantially less now. It is a big machine and
     quite adept at multi tasking, 20 people can be logged on at once and SATURN
     won't flinch. Why use it? is a more difficult question. SATURN is arcane, difficult,
     and not nearly as spiffy as a Macintosh when it comes to computers. There are PC's
     connected to the Internet which are much more user friendly, so why use SATURN
     at all if it's so bad? Well, firstly, in Robinson it is difficult to get to one of these
     PC's, which are in rooms 325 and 303 and are reserved for classes, and secondly
     SATURN isn't so bad. There are certain benefits to using the VAX over a PC.
     Besides being a heck of a lot of fun, SATURN is easy to call into from off campus.
     I read the bulk of my electronic mail and do most of my Internetting from home,
     calling SATURN over a modem line. SATURN is not very picky about what you
     use to call in, whether it is a Commodore, an Apple, an IBM, or a dumb terminal,
     you can use just about anything. As you get more and more experienced, you will
     begin to discover wonderful things available on SATURN such as the TALK and
     FINGER programs which open up new worlds of interest.

Question #5: "How do I log onto one of these terminal things?" Easy enough. The
     terminals are actually connected to several computers which reside ELSEWHERE,
     one of these is SATURN where your account is, so you have to select SATURN.
     There could be any of several things on the terminal screen when you sit down at
     it. The first and best is a prompt that says:

          serve303>

     If this happens to be the case, type C SATURN [return]. What you are doing is
     telling the powers of computer magic to Connect you to SATURN ─ this makes
     sense in a twisted fashion. You will then get a prompt that says something like:

               Rowan College of New Jersey Academic Vax 4000

          Username:

     then you type in your account name (usually your own name) and press [return]. (It
     is also possible that when you sit down at the terminal, you will see a prompt that
     says

          Username:

     if this is the case, try logging in, you might already be connected to SATURN. If
     the computer gives you grief, turn the terminal off and on again (computer geeks
     call this a 120 reset or hitting the "Big Red Switch" (regardless of what color it is);
     saying either of these things will instill confidence in all those around you).

     Next, the computer will prompt you for your

          Password:

     enter your password and press [return]. When you first get an account, your
     username and your password are the same. If this is the case, you will have to
     change your password as soon as you log in for security reasons.

     After all these interactions have happily transpired, you will see a bunch of jargon
     and finally the prompt

          $

     For some reason, when the people at DEC invented VMS they decided that the $
     would be an innocuous prompt. It means that the VAX is waiting for a command.
     (Personally, I can't stand the $ prompt; luckily, it's very easy to change.)

     To change your password type

          set password

     you will be prompted for your old password; enter it (you won't see it appear on the
     screen, security reasons again, wouldn't want people looking over your shoulder
     now would you?), then when you are prompted for your new password, enter that.
     It's easy.
          It's important to remember that just because you're logged into SATURN
     you're not necessarily using (some computer geeks will say "jacked" into) the
     Internet. SATURN is a computer with many functions; "the Net" is only one of
     them.

          Lastly, when you sit down at the screen, someone else could have forgotten
     to log out and you might see the $ prompt. In this event, it is considered polite to
     log them out by typing

          lo

     rather than doing something awful. Then feel free to log yourself in.

Question #6: "How do I log out?" Never never never never leave a terminal without
     logging out first. People can and will do horrible things to you if you do, like
     posting ridiculous messages all over USENET in your name. To log out, type lo
     at the $ prompt. Turning the terminal off does not log you out. When you turn the
     terminal off, you are in effect only turning off the monitor, the computer itself is in
     another room and you may find that you're still logged on days later. (If this does
     happen you can type STOP YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME) at the $ prompt and it will
     fix everything.)

Question #7: "Now what?" once you've got the $ prompt, type MENU. You don't have to
     deal with VMS ever again. The menu looks like this



     and is relatively easy to use. The menu is subject to change as useful things are
     added, so it may not look exactly like this. Soon there should be a "logout" option,
     as well as options for FTP and TELNET which are not currently available through
     the menu. The menu is not the be-all and end-all of SATURN. It was basically
     hacked together by The Lord High Fixer, Bruce Klein, one afternoon because some
     people with large fingers were having trouble remembering commands. As Bruce
     finds better things to do with his time, menu updates may be few and far between.
     You are probably better off (certainly in the long run) not using the menu. But as
     I said, the choice is yours.

Question #8: "How do I MUD?" You TELNET to MUDs, which are games run on
     computers across the net. Reading rec.games.mud (see USENET News below) will
     help you find places to do this. Currently there is no school policy on game playing
     but this could change if the privilege is abused. Use a little common sense, students
     needing a terminal for school work (or even something as innocuous as reading
     their e-mail) always take precedent over game playing. MUDs can be terrific fun,
     but they're only the tip of the iceberg, there are many other exciting things on the
     Internet awaiting discovery.

Question #9: "How much does all this cost?" Many people are familiar with organizations
     like Compuserve or America On Line which provide computer services for an hourly
     or monthly fee. The Internet however, is free ─ to the end user at least. Rowan
     College pays a certain amount of money every year for our Internet connection and
     doles out accounts to students, faculty, and alumni free of charge. Other colleges
     may charge fees for accounts, this thankfully is not the case here. If you TELNET
     from Glassboro to Singapore for 94 hours and 6 minutes one month, Rowan's
     Internet bill will not be one cent more. On the Internet there are no such things as
     "incurring toll charges," because no one is making any "long distance" calls. The
     lines upon which Internet traffic travel are mostly lines which are leased on a
     monthly or yearly basis, regardless of the amount of traffic they get. So don't feel
     guilty. I know it's sort of like someone telling you it's okay to leave the door open
     with the air conditioner running but you'll get used to it.

Question #10: "How do I view gif's on SATURN?"  Hold your breath until the college buys
     a bunch of SGI workstations. Gif's are binary image format files (pictures) which
     a PC or a Macintosh can display but your terminal never will. The closest you'll get
     to a gif on a SATURN terminal is some clever ASCII art. If you have a GIF on
     SATURN you can move it to a PC (see chapter 6 on FTP) and look at it there.
                               USENET News







     USENET News is probably a good place to start fiddling with the Internet. Many
people don't see much of a need to go any farther. When most new users think of the
Internet, it is actually USENET News which they are thinking of. Many people confuse
USENET with the Internet. USENET is not the Internet. In fact, the more experienced a
user you become, the less important USENET will probably seem to you. USENET News
will be a familiar concept to those of you who have used a computer Bulletin Board System
(BBS). USENET is an open discussion forum where people "post" messages that other
people can read. These discussions are filled with useful information, as well as lots of
name calling and generally childish behavior. A perfect example of how USENET News
can be useful is this: Say your roommate is an ardent Dead Head who has a complete
collection of Grateful Dead bootlegs from 1971 to 1992 except for an Oakland show on the
seventh of June 1973 which he just can't find anywhere. Say also that his birthday is
coming up in a couple of weeks. If you were to post a message in the USENET group
rec.music.gdead somewhere between 45,000 and 90,000 people would probably read that
message. There's a good chance that one of them has a 6/7/73 Oakland tape that they'd be
more than happy to send you in exchange for a dollar twenty-five in postage. If your
iguana, Admiral Poindexter, seems to be particularly listless and suffering from scale-rot,
a post to rec.pets.herpetology would let 20 or 30 thousand reptile enthusiasts mull over
your problem and offer suggestions. There are many other useful, interesting, and repugnant
groups on USENET (alt.binaries.sounds.armpit.noises for example ─ is there really a
market in digitized sounds of armpit noises?) "Messages" are stored within "newsgroups"
which can be thought of as folders in a filing cabinet which is owned by a bunch of people
who never see one another. The folders are grouped together by subject, just like in real
life. Unlike real life (which cyberpunks call "RL") lots of people are always poking around
inside the filing cabinet reading things that have been left there and scribbling on them. So
if you're looking for a vegetarian restaurant, you could stick a note in the folder marked
"vegetarian restaurants" saying "Where's a good one near Glassboro?" and
someone would write underneath it "There isn't one. Try Phili. There's one
at 1000 Arch St. called the _South East Chinese Restaurant_ 215-
629-1888." which you could read next time you checked the file folder.
     There are all sorts of news readers, programs which format the way which USENET
News will appear to you. Fortunately the newsreader used on SATURN is a simple and
effective one. (In the event that you get on Jeopardy and one of the topics is "Computer
Newsreaders on SATURN," the newsreader that you're going to be using is called ANU
NEWS. ANU NEWS was written by some nice people at the Australian National University
in Canberra, Australia. (We're currently using version 6.0 which came out in 1990.) The
ANU people wrote this software to be used locally, within a company or an organization
as a sort of assistant to e-mail. They only made it Internet compatible as an afterthought.
(What sagacity way back there in 1990!))


STARTING OUT
     USENET News is located on the menu under the Applications heading, it's called
Net News, or you can just type NEWS at the $ prompt, it's up to you. After you've selected
news, you'll see

     Connecting to server @ gboro (using TCP [UCX])
     Retrieving newsgroups:

which will be followed by a few rows of dots which will appear over the next few seconds.
It takes a long time to call up news, so don't be afraid if your terminal looks frozen for a
minute or so, it's not. A lot of data is being transferred between machines. (One of the
main reasons that Rowan chose to use ANU NEWS is because it allows the actual news
data to be kept on another machine. This is called a "diskless" client. SATURN has limited
disk space.) After the data is loaded you will see a new screen like this:

          NEWSGROUPS REGISTERED, 5

          Newsgroup                     count     unread
        ─>alt.activism                  123       123
          alt.alien.visitors            6         6
          gsc.announce                  21        9
          gsc.classified                14        2
          rec.motorcycles               4221      4221

the list of groups will be different of course. The number of registered groups will change
from time to time ─ don't worry about it. SATURN automagically registers you to every
new group that is created (so you don't miss out on any action). The COUNT tag is how
many messages are posted to this group, the UNREAD tag tells you how many of those
messages you haven't read. Simple. You can move up and down through this list by using
the arrow keys, when you find something interesting, such as alt.alien.visitors, pressing
[return] will "open" that group, one of two things will happen: 1) You will be greeted with
a list of subject lines, these are the "subjects" of the messages posted there. 2) Nothing will
happen, there are no messages posted in the group. (The count tag would have read 0.)
Many of the groups on USENET are no longer used by anyone, alt.desert.storm for
example is a group which has seen its heyday long ago. Other groups are jokes, created by
people who thought it would be funny to start a group called
alt.swedish.chief.bork.bork.bork.
     Let's say for now that there have been some messages posted to alt.alien.visitors
and we open it up, we would see a screen something like this:

     ALT.ALIEN.VISITORS: Items (#1 - #6) Reg:1 Prot:RW Srv:@gboro

          Title                         From      Lines     Date
 ─>  1    Ufo's took my baby away       [e-mail]
     2    Landing at Stonehenge         [e-mail]
     3    Life on Mars                  [e-mail]
     4    Re: Life on Mars
[e-mail]
     5    Re: Life on Mars              [e-mail]
     6    Re: Life on Mars              [e-mail]

The subject of the message hopefully tells us something about it, the "lines" tag is how
many lines long the message is (these are frequently run over by the "from" don't worry
about it). Let's say we're interested in the message "Life on Mars", move down to it by
pressing the down arrow, then press [return] to open it. The message will look something
like this:

     Group: alt.alien.visitors Item 3   (Current Item Range #1-
#6)
     Subject: Life on Mars
     From: [e-mail]
     Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1993 15:21:22 GMT

     Last week some spacemen landed in my yard. I fed them
     Otter Pops which they seemed to like, though they told me
     through sign language they had some problems digesting.
     Then they emitted a green beam and I was rendered semi-
     conscious. They took all the little houses out of my
     Monopoly game. I asked them where they were from, they
     pointed toward Mars.

     NEWS>

There are several things we could do now. Firstly, we could CLOSE the message: typing
"close" would take us back to the previous screen, the subject headings. Secondly, we might
want to reply to this message, send personal e-mail to [e-mail] saying that we had
a similar experience. To do this, type REPLY; this will toss us into our mail editor with the
TO heading already filled out. A handy tool. We might want to send this mail to a friend
who is very interested in this sort of thing. To do this, type FORWARD. Lastly we might
want to FOLLOW the message with an experience of our own. Typing "follow" would get
us a prompt that says:

     newsgroups: alt.alien.visitors

this gives us a chance to add other groups to the distribution of the message. For now, just
press [return], for a screen that looks like this:

     In article <[e-mail]>,
     [e-mail] writes:


     >Last week some spacemen landed in my yard. I fed them Otter
     >Pops which they seemed to like, though they told me through
     >sign language they had some problems digesting. Then they
     >emitted a green beam and I was rendered semi-conscious. They
     >took all the houses out of my Monopoly game. I asked them
     where >they were from, they pointed toward Mars.

     [end of file]


followed by some stuff at the bottom. The text of the message we are following is included,
preceded by "attribution marks", in this case the ">" (you can change these, but >'s are
fairly standard). You can edit the message to remove things that aren't pertinent and add
your own comments. Our final message might look like this:

     In article <[e-mail]>,
     [e-mail] writes:


     >Last week some spacemen landed in my yard. I fed them
     Otter >Pops which they seemed to like,

     It has been my experience with spacemen, that Fruit Loops
     are the only thing that they will consistently eat
     without developing severe digestive problems. Giving them
     Otter Pops is dangerous!

     >I
     >asked them where they were from, they pointed toward
Mars.

     In all likelihood, they were actually pointing to Venus,
     a visit by Martians is rare, while Venusians are always
     dropping by our planet to get copies of T.V. Guide.

     [end of file]

pressing ctrl-z will now post this article to USENET. You'll see that any lines that didn't
pertain to our points about extra-terrestrial digestion have been deleted. It isn't necessary
to do this, but it's considered impolite to quote an entire message and then add two lines
at the bottom. Remember as well, that thousands of people are going to read
alt.alien.visitors tomorrow and if you sound like an idiot a lot of people are going to know
about it. When you're done using USENET, a final ctrl-z at the "newsgroups" screen will
exit.

     Rowan College has a number of groups which are available only to students of the
college, these groups have names which begin with rowan (fancy that). It would be a very
Good Idea if you post to one of these groups first, just to get the hang of it.


SKIPPING MESSAGES
     There are times that you don't want to be troubled with reading new messages, if
say for example you have just returned from vacation and haven't been reading news in a
couple of weeks, you might not want to muddle through the 2,542 unread messages in
rec.motorcycles.

When you are "registered" to a group, that means that SATURN will keep track of what
messages you have read and have not read in that group. After we have read message
number three, "Life on Mars" the message subject will no longer be highlighted. This is a
handy way to keep from reading the same message over and over again. When you are
done reading messages in a news group, type CLOSE, and then when you have the subject
page again, type SKIP at the group alt.alien.visitors, this will mark all the messages in this
group as "read", so that you won't see them again when you log back on.

     ALT.ALIEN.VISITORS: Items (#1 - #6) Reg:1 Prot:RW Srv:@gboro

          Title                         From      Lines     Date
 ─>  1    Ufo's took my baby away       [e-mail]
     2    Landing at Stonehenge         [e-mail]
     3    Life on Mars                  [e-mail]
     4    Re: Life on Mars
[e-mail]
     5    Re: Life on Mars              [e-mail]
     6    Re: Life on Mars              [e-mail]


SAVING MESSAGES
     From time to time you will undoubtedly come across a message that contains useful
data that you might want to reference later. To save a message, just type save item
range. Where "item range" is the range of messages you want saved. If you only want to
save the current message, you can type save by itself. save 1-10 would save messages
1-10. There are several options you might want to use with it which I will include here:

/FILE=output_file_nametells SATURN what filename to save the message under.
/ALL                saves all the messages in that newsgroup to a specified file.
/APPEND             glues the message onto the end of the specified file. So if
                    someone posts "cool_things_FAQ part 1 of 4" you can save
                    it and /APPEND parts 2,3, and 4 to it.
/TITLE="title"      will save all files whose titles contain the specified word. This
                    could be used to save all the messages in a particular thread.

Example:

     save /file=stupid.txt

will save the current message as "stupid.txt;1". (See chapter 10 for more on version
numbers and VMS filenames.)


REGISTERING AND DEREGISTERING NEWSGROUPS
     At last count, there were over 2,000 newsgroups carried by Rowan, this is a
staggering amount of information, and no one person is going to have the time nor the
inclination to sort through all of it every day. It is for this reason a Good Idea to keep the
number of newsgroups which appear on your screen as few as possible. SATURN keeps
a list of the groups which you are subscribed to; when you first log on, the default is ALL.
What do you do if you sell your motorcycle after breaking your foot playing motor-polo
at an Internet Motorcycle Club Ride 'n Feed Rally and never want to see a motorcycle
again? Well, obviously you're not going to be reading rec.motorcycles again. So, by typing
DEREGISTER at that newsgroups subject line, SATURN will make it so that you don't see
that group when you log onto news. Of course you don't want to have to DEREGISTER
1990 groups to get the ten that you want, there is an easier way. Firstly, go through the list
of groups and pick out a few that you might want to read, and write these names down on
a piece of paper, then at the newsgroup subject menu, type DEREGISTER /ALL. This will
unsubscribe you from all the groups on USENET News, you can now type REGISTER
followed by the name of a group you want to read:

     REGISTER rowan.comp_soc

will subscribe the group rowan.comp_soc, you can then repeat this procedure for the
groups you are interested in reading. Also, you will notice that when you log on, you are
subscribed to groups that you didn't sign up for. Saturn automatically subscribes you to
newly created groups so that you know they exist. Simply DERESISTER from the ones that
you don't want.
     If you later want to register to some new groups, typing

     DIR/ALL

at the NEWS> prompt will show you all the available newsgroups. The ones which you are
registered to will appear in bold text, and the ones which you aren't registered to will be
displayed in normal text. When you have registered to those you're interested, typing

     DIR/REGISTER

will again display only the groups to which you are currently registered.


FINDING WHAT YOU WANT IN A NEWSGROUP USING SEARCH
     SEARCH is possibly the most useful tool you will find in NEWS. It allows you to
tell SATURN to go through dozens or hundreds of messages and look for a particular word
or series of letters. Let's say for example that you're looking for a one way ticket to
Sheboygan Wisconson to attend the Cheese Festival and you know that people on
rec.travel.air are always selling one way legs on that newsgroup for great prices. So you
register to rec.travel.air and open the newsgroup up, only to find that there are 2,107
messages in it. Now what! By the time you find what you're looking for, the Cheese Festival
will be over! Never fear, VMS to the rescue. You can position the indicator at the message
where you want to commence searching and type

     SEARCH sheboygan

and SATURN will begin searching through messages. As soon as it finds the "string" it will
open up that message with the appropriate word highlighted. You can continue searching for
the same "string" in subsequent messages by merely typing

     SEARCH

no string is required. SATURN will assume that you want to look for the same word again.
There are a number of "switches" you can use to modify your search, search multiple news
groups, etc. You can use HELP to find out more about them. Be warned, the SEARCH
command is a real CPU hog. If there are a lot of people on and SATURN is being
particularly sluggish, initiating a SEARCH can bring everything to an ugly halt.


HIERARCHIES (WHERE DO I LOOK FOR THE GOOD STUFF?)
     You will soon discover that USENET is broken up into lots of tiny pieces. We have
looked at an insignificant number of them. Computer people are obsessed by "path names",
i.e. the name of something intuitively telling you where to find it. Like if you were to name
your bathroom "second_floor/third_door_on_left" people wouldn't have to ask you "where's
your "second_floor/third_door_on_left", they'd know. For what it's worth, this is how
USENET works. Groups are broken down into one of several categories. At our particular
site, there are perhaps twenty-five different "prefixes" which the groups may begin with.
Some of these are:

alt: "alternative." The alt groups are helter-skelter, they are not considered "real"
     USENET groups and any bozo who feels like it can create one (and they do). Alt
     groups are created without voting. Some of them tend to live fast, live fast and die,
     or live slow and die, or just plain die right off the bat with no mucking about,
     depending. The distribution (availability) of these groups is eclectic, hence, if you
     have a friend in Peoria who says "hey, check out alt.my.name.is.bob it's really
     cool!" you will find that we don't happen to get a group called alt.my.name.is.bob,
     and conversely, your friend in Peoria might not get alt.exploding.kibo (but thankfully
     we do.)

bionet: "biology network." As one might expect, the groups which begin with "bionet" are
     biology related.

bit.listserve: These groups are part of "bitnet mailing lists." Bitnet is an archaic part of the
     Internet designed by IBM (as apparently are most things designed by IBM). Bitnet
     does have a terrific variety of listserv's. (Check out the chapter on listserv's and
     mailing lists for a more detailed explanation.) These are some of the more popular
     ones.

biz: "business related."

comp:"computers." As you might suspect, everything in the comp hierarchy deals with
     computer. Examples: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games, comp.unix.wizards.

ieee: "Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers." If you're wondering how many
     potatoes it will take to power your television, this is where you want to start looking
     for plans.

gnu: "Gnu's Not Unix." Gnu is part of the Free Software Foundation. They're an
     ideological sort who try to advance a particular philosophy about software. They
     believe, among other things, that when you buy a computer program you ought to be
     able to modify it. So any Gnu software you get will come with the source code. This
     may not be terribly important to you but it is to computer geeks. Gnu makes a very
     powerful chess program.

k12: "kindergarten through twelfth grade." As you might expect, these groups are used
     primarily by school children. It's interesting to note that their conversation is not
     radically different from that of most people on the Net (though they use far fewer
     expletives and their sexual innuendos are not as juvenile.) I've found that the real
     culprits here are the k12 teachers who rarely seem to have anything interesting to say.
     Children who have access to the k12 groups through schools can't read
     alt.k12.teachers but you can. (Don't let it swell your head.) It can be fun to
     eavesdrop.

misc: "miscellaneous." This is sort of the "protista" of USENET. Anything that no one
     knows what to do with goes here. Notable among them are the misc.forsale and
     misc.forsale.wanted hierarchies, which can be useful.

sci: "science." Look for science related topics here.

soc: "social." Groups on people and interaction. Many ethnic discussions can be found here,
     in the soc.culture hierarchy, such as soc.culture.british. Also the nesting ground of
     soc.penpals, a good way to get net-friends.

talk: "talk." Groups in the "talk" hierarchy tend towards the "flame-war" side of things.
     These are usually discussions that people take seriously and that also have no hope
     of ever being resolved. talk.origins for example, deals with the origins of life on
     earth.

news: "news." These deal with USENET. Many useful groups are to be found here, such
     as news.answers, which contains FAQ files from all the USENET groups. Also
     news.newusers.questions, a forum for fielding questions by new users.

rec: "recreation." Things such as sports, art, games, etc. can be found here. Examples: the
     ever popular rec.motorcycles, and rec.games.chess.

rowan: "rowan." Groups of interest to Rowan College students alone. These groups can't
     be read off campus (and why would anybody want to?). This is the best place to
     practice USENETting ... that's what they're there for.

vmsnet: "VMS networks." If you happen to find a VAX in the trash and take it home, set
     it up in the basement and start installing terminals around your house, these are the
     people who can help you when you start to run into technical problems. It's basically
     sophisticated technobabble about the VMS operating system.

Once you become familiar with the prefixes, you'll begin to have an idea of how to find
things. So if you were looking for a newsgroup devoted to the discussion of J.R.R. Tolkien's
books, (which there is btw) you could probably figure out that it would be called something
like rec.arts.books.tolkien and probably not to be found under sci.bionet anywhere.


"SIG" FILES
     You will see that many posts to USENET have a "signature" attached to them,
something that looks like

     --
     kyle cassidy                  "i was gratified to be able
to
     [e-mail]       answer immediately. i said
i
     office of academic computing   didn't know." -- mark twain

or some such similar nonsense. This is a way to give USENET readers a ubiquitious non
sequitor that tells something about yourself. If you happen to collect antique fountain pens,
putting "I collect antique fountain pens" in your "sig" file might get you e-mail from
someone who saw a post you made on alt.westley.crusher.die.die.die saying that she too
collects fountain pens and do you want to swap. ANU NEWS will support signature files.
(Also called ".sig" because on a UNIX machine, the signature's filename is .signature.) If
you must have a .sig (and it's not necessarily a bad idea) keep it to 3 or 4 lines at the most.
You'll see people with 10 or 15 line sigs and soon realize how annoying it is. To make a sig,
use EVE to create a file called "SIGNATURE.TXT" and put your sig in that file. Then, use
EVE to create a file called "LOGIN.COM" or edit it if you already have one. LOGIN.COM
is the equivalant of DOS' AUTOEXEC.BAT, a file which is execuited every time you log
onto the computer. Put the line

     $ DEFINE MAIL_SIGNATURE $DISK1:[STUDENT.YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME]SIGNATURE.TXT

in the LOGIN.COM file. This tells SATURN where to find your sig file. Problems will arise
if you are a GUEST using SATURN, you're account might be located on
$DISK1:[GUEST] instead of $DISK1:[STUDENT]. If you get an error, try changing
that. If you still can't get it to work you may just have to suffer unless you can find help
from some VMS wizzard on rowan.support.


SOME IMPORTANT FINAL WORDS BEFORE YOU POST
     Since so many people are going to see your posting, you should not post carelessly.
Read before you post. Many groups provide Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files for the
benefit of everybody. If you are a frequent reader of the group rec.music.gdead you are
probably tired of hearing questions like "What are the names of the members of the Grateful
Dead?", "How do I get tickets to their shows," and "Where do I get a tour schedule?" To
avoid re-hashing the same topics over and over, answering the same questions again and
again these FAQs have been created by users of the newsgroup. The people in
rec.arts.books for example, got so tired of people asking "Who wrote The monkeys
paw?" that they included it in their FAQ file. (It's W.W. Jacobs, btw.) If you post a silly
question without reading the FAQ you're liable to get flamed, which is the USENET
practice of sending disparaging e-mail to people who commit a faux pas of one variety or
another. USENET is made up of a wide variety of people, many of them not overly
forgiving. FAQs are usually posted weekly or monthly, and posting the message "will
somebody please send me the FAQ is more acceptable than asking a question that everyone
is sick of hearing.
     Be polite when posting and answering posts, remember that there is a person on each
end and the Internet in the middle ─ don't send anybody mail that you wouldn't want to get
yourself, if given a choice between sending someone a nasty-gram and ignoring an inane
post, ignore the post.


POSTING FOR HELP ON HOMEWORK
     Of course one would be a fool to overlook the research potential of the Internet ─
hopefully that is why you are learning how to use it. However, there is a right and a wrong
way to go about getting this information. Posting to a message to rec.arts.books that says
"Can somebody send me a 3 page synopsis of William Faulkner's
_The Sound and the Fury_?" is transparent and will probably get you flamed by a
bunch of people shouting "Do your own homework edu-breath!" When posting
regarding homework, it is considered USENET-polite to say that is what you are doing,
therefore, a post such as: "I'm doing a paper on William Faulkner's _The
Sound and the Fury_. My Thesis is: 'Faulkner uses the character
Dilsy to demonstrate stability.' I would like the input of Net-
Wisdom. If anybody would care to discuss this, please e-mail."
would generate much more helpful information. People are much more willing to talk to
you if they know that you know something about the topic. The people that you are trying
to reach (in this case, Faulkner buffs) probably don't care to write somebodies research
paper for them, but they probably are inclined to offer suggestions, and may even be
interested in reading what you have already written. Net-Wisdom like this can be
invaluable, since at not a few of the rec.arts.books readers probably have Ph.D.'s, and
some of them might teach Faulkner regularly.


EDIT YOUR FOLLOWUPS
     I can't stress this enough. When following a message, assume that your reader has
a general idea of what the topic is. Edit out all irrelevant lines you can summarize what you
deleted in brackets if you want, such as [argument about burger king deleted]
no one wants to read fifty four quoted lines to fine your one line response at the end. When
I read a USENET posting (and this is probably true of many others) if the first page
contains only quoted lines, I skip the message.                             Electronic Mail







     On the menu, under UTILITIES, you will find the MAIL option. Electronic mail is
one of the most exciting aspects of the Internet, with it, it is possible to send a message to
a user on the other side of the world in less time than it takes Dominos to get a pizza to
your house. (My average time to Australia is about 5 minutes.) Your electronic mail address
provides the Internet with all the information necessary for messages to find you on the
Net. It is quite likely that your best friend from high school who got married and moved
to Sheboygan Wisconsin has some type of e-mail access, whether this is through the
Internet, or CompuServe, or America On Line or whatever. Your friend might ask you for
your e-mail address in order to send you electronic mail. This would be:

     [e-mail]

This is what is called "Internet format". There are other types of addresses which use weird
signs; you'll see e-mail addresses with ! and % signs in them, worry about those later. For
example, my e-mail address is [e-mail]; any mail sent on the Internet
with that as the To: field will get to me.
     In order for computer to be able to find one another on the network, it is important
that they all have unique names. Each computer which is attached to the Internet has such
a name, many of them are funny (the computers "Ren" and "Stimpy" at the university of
Miami), some are stupid, most are purely functional ("msuvx1" for example is the name of
one of the computers at Memphis State University ─ it stands for
MemphisStateUniversityVaXnumber1) and most computers are named in groups. Rowan's
real VAXen, (the ones used to run the college) are named after comic book characters,
Thing, Hulk, Storm, etc.) Academic Computing's computers are named after gods (Mars,
Saturn, Elan, Charon, etc). Computers are suffixed with Domain Names, names that attempt
to descriptively tell who or what they are, these names are separated by periods. Thus
saturn.rowan.edu is the computer named "SATURN" at the domain called "rowan" and
the "edu" stands for "EDUcational facility" (you can guess yourself where the computer
called "whitehouse.gov" is located and who it belongs to.)

SENDING MAIL
     Let's say for example that you want to send e-mail to our old friend
[e-mail]. Firstly, invoke MAIL either through the menu, or by typing (strangely
enough) MAIL at the $ prompt. You'll get a new prompt that looks like this:

     MAIL>

This is a distinctive prompt, much more utilitarian than the $. From the MAIL utility we
want to send mail, so we type in SEND. At the To: prompt, we enter phil's electronic mail
address:

     [e-mail]

We are then asked for a subject. Subjects are optional. Press [return] when you're done.
You are then dumped into the EVE editor, you'll see an [end of file] marker at the
top of the screen. As you type, the EOF marker will move down the screen. Don't type
anything after it. (If for some reason, the screen becomes jumbled and your cursor seems to
drop beneath the EOF marker, pressing ctrl-w will wipe the screen and reformat it, doing
this will not hurt your text.) When you're done typing your message, Ctrl-z will send it off
to Phil. (Read the chapter on EVE for more on this.)


READING MAIL
     If you have new mail, you will be notified when you log on, or when it arrives. To
read new mail, press [return] at the MAIL prompt. After you are done reading the mail
message, type del to delete it. If you don't delete the message, it will be saved as old mail.
Sometimes it is helpful to save important messages, but it is also important to keep the
amount of old mail saved in your account as low as possible.
     To read an old message, type DIR at the mail prompt (you can't have new mail when
you do this, or only your new mail will be listed). Your old messages will be listed, entering
the number of the message you want to read will bring it up. After a message has been
selected, you may REPLY to it, FORWARD it, or DELete it.


SENDING MAIL TO AMERICA ON LINE AND COMPUSERVE
     It may come to pass that a friend of yours has an account with America On Line or
Compuserve. Both these companies provide Internet like services including electronic mail.
Each uses a propriaty mailing system that is geared towards local (i.e. within the company)
use. So your friend who has an AOL account might say "Send me e-mail, my account name
is DYLLANB" And being the astute individual that you are, you would immediately think
"hey, there's something wrong here!" Things would get worse when your friend on
Compuserve tells you to "E-mail me at 7111,723." What is that? an account name? If you
try to tell SATURN to send mail to "7111,723" it will laugh at you. Luckily both AOL and
Compuserve both have gateways, computers that act as a sort of translator between their
individual cyber-islands and the rest of the networked world. You have to send mail to these
gateways which will then figure out how to get the mail to your pals. To send mail to
America On Line, simply put @AOL.COM at the end of the e-mail address
("[e-mail]" then). To send mail to Compuserve, change the comma to a peroid and
add @COMPUSERVE.COM to the end of the address ("[e-mail]").


OUR PARTICULAR VERSION OF MAIL
     VMS mail as it came packaged with the VAX was intended to support a local
network, say the campus, or an office building. It was created with a few hundred users in
mind and therefore it isn't suited for the millions of possible addresses to be found on the
Net. For that reason, SATURN runs a modified version of the VMS MAIL utility. The
modification is a program called "MX Mail" if anyone ever asks you. (And it's not far
fetched that someone will say "Hey, what mailer are you using?")


CREATING A DISTRIBUTION LIST
     At time you may have the desire to send the same message to a large group of people.
Let's take a practical application. Say that I have a list of the e-mail addresses of everyone
who has purchased a copy of this SATURN guide.  It would be nice if I could e-mail them
all updates and errata sheets etc. when they came out. At last count however, there are
something like 500 copies of this manual floating about in our local universe. I for one, don't
get paid enough to type an errata sheet 500 times and mail it out to a list of people no matter
how much I like them. (Even if it involved  Black Sabbath getting back together and playing
a free bar-b-q at my house I probably wouldn't have the inclination to send mail to 500
people.) Luckily Digital thought of this when they put MAIL together. They realized that
Wanda T. Corporate-Manager would have different groups of people that she wanted to send
lists to, so they created a "Distribution List" option. Using a distribution list I can send one
mail message to the distribution list, and VMS will see that this message is propagated and
distributed to everyone on it. The actual creation and use of a distribution list is easier than
tying your shoes. Here is goes:

STEP 1:   Create a file using EVE. The file can be called whatever you
          want it to, but it must end in the extension .dis (For
          example, guide-update-list.dis).

STEP 2:   In this list, put the e-mail addresses of everyone you want the mail to
          go to. Example:

          KERSHENBLATT
          DRIES@GBORO
          [e-mail]
          CHASKES
          [e-mail]
          [e-mail]

STEP 3:    Save the file.

STEP 4:   When sending mail to the list, in the To: field, put
          @listname.dis (For example guide-update-
          list.dis).

STEP 5:   Send your message. Either type it, or use the include file
          option.

STEP 6:   Think how much time you've saved. Send FTD flowers and
          candy samplers to the nice people at DEC.


MAIL FOLDERS
     Though it is entirely possible to survive in this world without using mail folders, it
is an unpleasant experience.
     MAIL allows you to organize your mail by putting it in folders. This is one of the
few times that Digital gave something a name that makes sense. (You just try and figure out
what F$GETDVI0 is supposed to do!) The three default folders are MAIL, NEWMAIL, and
WASTEBASKET. New mail is kept in the NEWMAIL folder until it is read, at which time
it becomes old mail and is moved automagically to the MAIL folder. Deleted mail is
temporarily placed in the WASTEBASKET folder until you exit from MAIL at which time
it is discarded into the cold vacuum of space.
     You move about through the folders by using the SELECT command. New folders
are created by MOVEing mail to them. Practical application:
     Let's say that when I enter MAIL I find the following three messages:

     # From              Date           Subject

     1 MX%"[e-mail] 28-FEB-1994          Eudora
     2 MX%"[e-mail]     28-FEB-1994          Fire. Heh.
     3 SMITHJ                 28-FEB-1994          Help!

I read message number one, it's from someone telling me were to find the off-line Macintosh
mail program Eudora. But since I don't like off-line mail programs, I delete the message.
Message number two is a hilariously funny story about two chickens, a troop of boy scouts,
and the Stanford Marching Band. It's so funny that I want to keep it to read over and over,
so I type:

     move funny

mail will respond with:

     Folder FUNNY does not exist.
     Do you want to create it (Y/N, default is N)?

I tell MAIL "yes" and the folder is created, that message is stuffed inside it. The "default
is N" business means that if I just hit [ENTER], MAIL will assume that I mean "no".
Message #3 turns out to be from someone who is looking for a copy of Eudora the
Macintosh off-line mail program. Rats! I can't remember the FTP site, but luckily, MAIL
doesn't delete messages until you exit from the program, so I can type

     select wastebasket

     wastebasket. 1 message selected

     forward 1 z

     message forwarded.

SMITHJ now has the location of Eudora. In the midst of this flurry of activity, a message
appears on my screen

     new mail from "[e-mail]"

This new mail is automagically put in the NEWMAIL folder, so I select that.

     select newmail
     1 message selected

Now I can read my new mail in the time honored fashion.



HOW TO SEE YOUR FOLDERS
     Great. You've got all these folders, how do you see what they are? From the MAIL>
prompt, the command

     dir /folders

will show you.


HOW TO DELETE A FOLDER
     Got extras? delete the folder by deleting all the messages in it. Select the folder, and
type

     del /all


EXTRACTING MAIL TO A FILE
     Say someone sends me a file that I want to use. Clare, for existence might send me
a mail message containing the e-mail addresses of everyone who bought a SATURN guide
and I might want to make a distribution list out of this. I can extract the mail into my root
directory by using the (get this) EXTRACT command.

     extract /noheader guide-update-list.dis

the /noheader switch tells MAIL to chop off the headers which would confuse the
distribution list otherwise. Of course I could just type

     extract guide-update-list.dis

and then use EVE to manually chop out the header.


CHANGING YOUR PERSONAL NAME
     When you send a mail message to someone, the From: line in the header looks  like
this

     From: [e-mail] "Kyle Cassidy"

This is useful in identifying the sender on systems where your account name is not
necessarily your name. (On ELAN for example, my account name is cass8806, people
getting mail from me at that address would have to look at my personal name to see who it
was from.
     MAIL allows you to change your personal name with the set personal_name
command. For example, from the MAIL> prompt

     set personal_name "Darth Vader"

the command

     show personal_name

(at the MAIL> prompt) would return

     Your Personal Name is "Darth Vader"

People would still get mail from [e-mail], but the name "Darth Vader"
would be tagged onto the end. Changing your personal name is usually considered childish
and you'll have a hard time getting people to take you seriously if your personal name is
"Ace Computer God", but I think everyone does it at least once.


HAVING YOUR MAIL FORWARDED TO A DIFFERENT ACCOUNT
     Let's say that you're going to visit your old friend Phlox who lives in Desmoins.
You're going to be there for a week and you know that you'll just rot away if you can't read
your e-mail. I know how you feel. Luckily, Phlox is not living entirely in the Dark Ages,
she has an account with America On Line. It would be nice if you could TELNET from
there to here and read your mail, but AOL doesn't support TELNET, at least not yet. Rats.
There is another option though, you can have your e-mail autoforward to Phlox's account.
(Oh goodie!) At the MAIL> prompt type

     set forward mx%"""[e-mail]"""

Don't ask what all the quotation marks are for. Typing

     show forward

at the MAIL> prompt will show you if you have forwarding turned on. When you get back
from Desmoins, type

     set noforward

to turn it off.


VALIDITY AND SECURITY OF ELECTRONIC MAIL
     It would be wrong to assume that e-mail is as secure as old fashioned "snail" mail.
It is not too difficult for someone who knows what they are doing to read your electronic
mail, also, it is likewise not too difficult for someone who knows what they are doing to send
you mail with the return address "[e-mail]" (or any other return address
for that matter). Therefore, if the message you are sending someone requires the utmost
privacy, either encrypt your mail before you send it (using some encryption utility like PGP
which you can find on the Net) or send it through the U.S. Snail.
                   FINGER and TALK







     The Internet has ways for users to find and communicate with one another. If mail
is analogous to the postal service, FINGER and TALK are comparable to the phone
company. Let's say for example that you and several friends want to invite me to lunch at
Taco Bell. Sending me e-mail may be futile, since you're leaving in a few moments ─ if
I'm not logged on, there's no way I'd get the message in time. The FINGER command
allows you to see who is logged onto a particular system at a particular time. Therefore
typing

     finger @saturn.rowan.edu

will give you

     Node:     SATURN (saturn.rowan.edu)
     Date:     8-NOV-1993 15:38
     Uptime:   4 days, 05:01 hours (since 4-NOV-1993 10:36)

     CASSIDY   Kyle Cassidy        bizlab210.rowan 11/08 10:24
     CHADWICK  Melissa Chadwick                    11/08 15:04
     GREENSPAN Arthur Miller                       11/08 14:54
     MURPHYM   Michael Murphy                      11/08 15:15
     SETH      Seth Bergmann       150.250.1.100   11/08 08:53
     SYSTEM    SYSTEM              zeus.rowan.edu  11/08 13:54

Total of 6 users logged on.

ah ha, there I am. Aside from FINGERing at a particular computer (in this case SATURN)
you can also FINGER individual users. If you were to type

     finger [e-mail]

you would see

     [saturn.rowan.edu]
     Login name: CASSIDY           In real life: Kyle  Cassidy
     Directory: $DISK1:[STUDENT.CASSIDY]
     On since: 8-NOV-1993 10:24:43 on TNA3: from bizlb2.rowan.edu
     Has no new mail.
     Project:
     install terminals in the rat. complete this saturn users
     manual.
     Plan:
     plan? plan? oh geez. don't ask me that. i've no idea.

The FINGER program (called a daemon) will let you know how long I've been logged on,
where I'm logged on from (in this case the business lab) and whether or not I have new
mail. This can be helpful if for example you've sent me mail and haven't heard from me,
you might want to check and see if I've logged in recently and read my mail. FINGER also
provides users with a chance to let the world know a little bit about themselves. The project
and plan files are visible to anyone who FINGERs you. Usually these files contain some
quote, quip or ascii drawing ─ but they can be used for more serious things. (finger
[e-mail]  for example will give you a project file containing
information on recent earthquakes (and there are more than you think!), [e-mail]
will give you information about that organization, instructions for getting on, etc..)
     To make your own project and plan files, all you have to do is create a text file
called project.txt and one called plan.txt, FINGER will do the rest. In this
example, SATURN is telling you that I've been logged on since 10:24 ─  I'm probably
ready for lunch by this point. If you were to send me e-mail now I'd get it in time. But what
if there were several things that needed clarification before we left? Say for example you
wanted to remind me to bring the disk with Castle Wolfenstien 3D on it, and there were
driving arrangements to work out, and you are not actually sure that I'll want to go to Taco
Bell ─  things that might take 3 or 4 e-mails to work out. Well, there is a better way.
Typing

     talk [e-mail]

would open up a two way "TALK session" similar to a phone conversation. Your screen
would be divided into two halves, top and bottom, and a message

     Message from [e-mail] at 15:35
     talk: connection requested by [e-mail].
     talk: respond with:   talk [e-mail]

would appear on my screen. If I was in the middle of something important I could ignore
this ─ it's just like the phone ringing. At the top of your screen the message

     [waiting for your party to respond]

would appear. When I answered the TALK request (by typing talk user@host), this
would be replaced by

     [connection established]

Once the connection is established, we could both type at the same time, your words would
appear, character by character as you typed them, on the top of the divided screen, and
mine would appear at the bottom.
     TALK is also very useful if your girlfriend is going to the University of Miami and
your phone bill is getting outrageous.... If the two sites TALKing at one another are very
far apart there may be a slight delay (one second is about the most severe TALK delay I've
ever seen) but it's still better than paying AT&T.
     While the temptation exists to start sending random TALK requests to people you
see logged in at bigbang.berkeley.edu just to ask them if they can get you Cliff Stoll's
autograph, this is considered a fairly rude thing to do ... while some people out there may
be just like you ─ students surfing the Net looking for things to do, people to TALK to and
they might love to get a TALK request from someone they don't know in New Jersey, but
other people use the Net for serious work ─ you might get some particle physicist really
annoyed at you that he stopped compiling his million line program to answer a TALK
request from some undergraduate goofball who just wants to chat about how the Huskies
are doing. You don't make random phone calls to people in Bangor to ask them if they
want to chat about Stephen King. (Read the chapter on IRC if you're really interested in
TALKing to people you don't know.)

     It is also entirely possible that the party you want to FINGER or TALK to (and
there will be no snide remarks) won't be able to hear you ─ some machines just can't do
it. This may change in the near future. Until very recently, there was no TALK "client" for
PC based networks. As of this writing though the program has become available and ought
to start appearing on more and more machines. A lot of things on the Net are incompatible
─ you may find the lack of standards to be the most frustrating thing about the Internet. (If
all cars were exactly the same it would be very easy to get spare parts, but it would be
impossible to perform certain tasks. Garbage trucks, cement mixers, limousines, and
ambulances for example need to be different from ordinary cars and for this reason their
parts are incompatible.) This is one of the reasons that for some people and some purposes
at least right now, using SATURN can be better than using one of the slick PC interfaces
you'll find on campus.


A WORD ABOUT PHONE
     VMS provides a utility called PHONE which you can use to contact other people
on SATURN. PHONE is very similar to TALK although it has the nice additional feature
of "ringing" the other person rather than flashing a TALK request once (a lot of times you
can't see who the TALK request was from because it has scrolled off your screen). Using
TALK is better than using PHONE because TALK is more diverse (it also gives you more
screen to type in). If someone does happen to PHONE you though, type

     phone

at the $ prompt and then

     answer

at PHONE's % prompt.             File Transfer Protocol: FTP









     We've discussed already the fact that files and information are archived on various
computers around the world (unfortunately there isn't much rhyme or reason to what is
archived where, but there are ways to find things that we will discuss later). Glassboro, for
example is the official archive site for digitized photographs of roller coasters (no foolin).
In this chapter we will discuss how files are moved between computers.
     Let's pretend for a moment that this guide was a little more useful than it actually
is and that thousands of people wanted copies of it. They could send me e-mail saying
"Kyle, could you please send me a copy of your SATURN guide?" The first few dozen
people would no doubt get a copy of this manual with a cheery note from me, but after a
while, I'd get tired of mailing out copies all day long, my mailbox would always be
cluttered and the in and out traffic might flood the mail gateway and make it difficult for
other people trying to use the system. There are several alternatives to this, the first and
simplest would be to put the file some place where people could get it without bugging me
and then leave a message on USENET telling how to get it. This happens all the time, and
if you read USENET, you'll continually see messages telling people that something can be
FTP'd from somewhere. FTP allows people with accounts on several computers to move
their files back and forth, but there is also a provision called "anonymous FTP" which will
allow certain files to be copied by anybody. After all, it wouldn't do much good for me to
put this guide someplace where people needed a password to get it.
     Let's say that while reading the USENET group rowan.support you see a message
that looks like this:

     from: [e-mail] (kyle cassidy)
     etc etc
     subject: saturn users guide

     hi all,
          since so many people have been asking for the
     SATURN users guide, i've archived it on our local
     machine. you can FTP it from gboro.rowan.edu in the
     /pub/netguides directory, it's called 'saturn.txt'

     kc


This is a more or less typical example. It might seem like Greek right now, but it's actually
fairly simple. The message says that the file we're looking for 'saturn.txt' is to be
found on the computer called gboro.rowan.edu and it is in the directory called
/pub/netguides. The subdirectory name /pub is fairly common, standing for public access.
If you're anonymously FTPing, it's fairly safe to bet that the things you are looking for are
somewhere in the directory structure beneath /pub. Most FTP sites try and be as user
friendly as possible, thus, a Macintosh word processing program might be found in a
directory called /pub/macintosh/applications/wordprocessing. Though it might seem confusing
at first, it actually makes quite a bit of sense. (If you are familiar with Macintosh, just think
of them as nested folders. The more you learn about computers, the more you'll realize that
most computers basically do the same things in largely similar ways. Though SATURN's
equivalent to a Macintosh "bomb" might be ten pages long and very ugly.)
     Anyway, enough with the non-sequiturs.
     To fire up FTP, you can either select it from the menu, which will give you a prompt
that looks like this:

     FTP>

or you can type in a command line from the $ prompt. At the ftp> prompt, type

     open name_of_the_computer_you_want_to_FTP_to

which in this case would be

     open gboro.rowan.edu

and from the $ prompt you would type this:

     ftp gboro.rowan.edu

Don't worry ─ it's the same program, you're just landing in it in different places.
     In any event, one of two things will happen. Firstly, you'll get nothing. It's really
easy for FTP to choke. If it does, just hit ctrl-c a few times and try it again. The reasons
for this are nebulous at best, don't worry yourself with it. If after a few tries you still get
nothing, forget it and try back later. If everything goes right, you'll get a screen that looks
like this:


     220 gboro.rowan.edu FTP server (ULTRIX Version 4.1 Tue Mar
19   00:38:17 EST 1991) ready.

     Connected to gboro.rowan.edu.
     Name (GBORO.ROWAN.EDU:cassidy): anonymous


If you had an account on the machine, typing you username would let you access your files
there, but since we're interested in something in the public directory, we can enter
anonymous. The machine will then ask you to

     331 Guest login ok, send ident as password.
     Password:

type your e-mail address (you won't see your password echo on the screen, for the obvious
over-the-shoulder security reasons). It is not necessary that you type your address, but it's
considered polite. It's a way for places to keep a record of who's logging onto their
computer (and don't try faking it smarty pants ─ by the time you connect to their machine,
they already know who you are. So be nice.) The machine will tell you:

     230 Guest login ok, access restrictions apply.

There are several rather useful commands which it is helpful to know when using FTP,
these are:

     HASH─turns the hash marks on.
     DIR─returns a list of what's in the current directory.
     CD─changes the current directory.
     GET─gets a file from the remote site.
     PUT─puts a file from your computer onto the remote computer.
     QUIT─logs you off of the remote site.

You can FTP for years and never use anything other than these six instructions. As soon
as you log onto an FTP site, it's a good idea to type

     hash

nothing will happen if you don't type it, but it makes things happier. When you type 'hash'
the computer will respond

     Hash marking ON

or something similar. What this does is print a hash mark, (#) on the screen every time one
kilobyte of information is transferred. Aside from relieving the tedium of staring at a
completely motionless screen, hash is nice because it gives you an idea of how quickly the
file is being transferred, and more importantly, whether it is being transferred at all ... like
I said, FTP isn't the most reliable program in the world.
     Let's have a look around by typing

     dir

the machine will show you what is in the current directory

     200 PORT command successful.

     150 Opening data connection for /bin/ls (150.250.1.8,2455)
(0   bytes).
     total 3
     -rwxr-x--x  1 351   15   261 Jun  7  1991 .cshrc
     -rwxr-x--x  1 351   15   234 Jun  7  1991 .login
     -rwxr-x--x  1 351   15   182 Jun  7  1991 .profile
     dr-xr-xr-x  2 0     15   512 Apr 28  1992  bin
     dr-xr-xr-x  2 0     15   512 Apr 28  1992  etc
     dr-xr-xr-x  3 351   15   512 Nov 23  16:00 pub

     226 Transfer complete.

     374 bytes received in 00:00:00.16 seconds

you can see some information about each of the files in the directory. Very little of this
information is useful or even interesting. One important thing is the first character of the
directory line, which is either "-" or "d". "d" means directory, thus "bin", "ect" and "pub"
are directories.  The "-" sign signifies a file.
     You will remember that the file we are looking for is in the directory /pub/netguides,
so we will have to change to that directory. I usually change directories one at a time, that
way if one of the directories has been removed for some reason you know immediately
which one it is and can look around in the general vicinity for one that might have
superseded it. So we'd type

     cd pub

the computer would respond with something like

     250 CWD command successful.

(CWD means "change working directory") If we were type "dir" again we could see what's
available to the public


     200 PORT command successful.

     150 Opening data connection for /bin/ls (150.250.1.8,2456)
(0 bytes).
     total 1194
     drwxr-xr-x  7 439    15     1536 Nov  9 11:47 Netguides
     -rw-r--r--  1 272    15    30720 Oct 19 1992 arch.tar
     -rw-r--r--  1 0      15  1111974 Jul 29 1992 gsc_map.tif
     -rw-r--r--  1 0      15    40098 Nov 23 15:58 panel.ps.Z
     -rw-r--r--  1 0      15    24093 Aug  2 12:08 research.ps.Z
     -rw-r--r--  1 0      15     6588 Aug  2 12:08 researc.rtf.Z

hmmmmm ... computer cabala. But we see the "Netguides" directory that we're looking for.
We can type

     cd Netguides

we should now be in the proper directory. Just to make sure, we'd type

     dir

to get a list of the files stored there. This might look something like this


150 Opening data connection for /bin/ls (150.250.1.8,2457) (0
bytes).
     total 205
     -rw-r--r--  1 439    15     18785 Nov 15 14:38 00-INDEX.TXT
     drwxr-xr-x  2 439    15      4096 Oct  4 15:51 Inprogress
     drwxrwxrwx  2 439    15       512 Nov  9 11:49 Incoming
     drwxr-xr-x  2 439    15      2048 Sep 20 11:06 Rowan
     drwxr-xr-x  2 439    15      2560 Nov 15 14:39 Unix
     -rw-r--r--  1 439    15     39230 Oct 27 08:57 BigDumb.txt
     -rw-r--r--  1 439    15     28948 Nov 17 11:33 saturn.txt
     -rw-r--r--  1 439    15     28948 Nov 14 11:36 saturn.ps.txt
     -rw-r--r--  1 439    15     34935 Aug 24 11:37 Surf10.txt
     -rw-r--r--  1 439    15     33817 Aug 24 11:37 Zen10.txt


now, to retrieve the file saturn.txt we'd simply type

     get saturn.txt

and watch the hash marks sail off the screen (actually, the don't tend to move very
quickly.) Of course nothing can be simple, especially where computers are involved (you
want easy to use, buy a Macintosh.)

     200 PORT command sucessful.
     ######
     150 Opening data connection for saturn.txt
(150.250.1.8,2444)
     226 Transfer complete.

     226 Transfer complete.

     727 bytes received in 00:00:00.35 seconds

You'll notice there is a file called saturn.ps.zip, which happens to be a copy of the
SATURN guide in the postscript printer language. If we have access to a postscript printer,
we might want to print this one out. Notice the file has the extension .zip. This extension
is generated by the compression program PKZIP. It's likely that many files you find will
be compressed in some way (.zip, .hqx, .tar.z are some popular ones), when you have
hundreds of megabytes of files stored, using compression programs is just common sense.
The problem with FTP is that anything that is not text (which usually means does not end
in the extension .txt, but not always) has to be treated differently. If we were to type

     get saturn.ps.zip

we'd get a file of garbage. Files which are not text files are called "binary" files. This
means that looking at them you would see a lot of meaningless characters which computers
understand and normal people don't. When you want to FTP a binary, you have to tell the
computer, "Hey, I'm going to get a binary file." You do this by typing

     bin

the computer will respond

     type set to IMAGE

(or something like that, it might just say "type set to I"). Bin stands for binary and is a
toggle switch, typing "ascii" will set the type back to the other mode, "text". All computer
programs (other than source code) are binary files, as are picture files, .gif, .tif, .wpg, and
anything that's compressed. If this isn't confusing enough, postscript files themselves are
"text" ─ but nobody puts a .ps file on their archive site without compressing it some way,
postscript files are notoriously huge, but they compress really well.
     PUTting works in exactly the opposite manner, it takes a file off of your directory,
and puts it onto the remote computer. Many FTP sites have what they call an "incoming"
directory, which is usually /pub/incoming, for uploads.

     Let's say that you're interested in more than one file in our /pub/netguides directory.
Perhaps you're a new Internet user and you'd like to have copies of all the netguides.  The
obvious solution is to sit there and type "get surf10.txt", wait for that file to transfer,
then type "get zen10.txt" until you had them all. This would work, but if you're like
me, this "hurry up and wait" stuff is worse than watching grass grow. FTP provides a way
of easily transferring multiple files. The commands mput and mget will multiple put and
multiple get (like most other things we've seen, this sort of makes sense.) To use mget and
mput you also have to use "wildcard" characters. There are several wildcard characters with
different meanings, some work on some systems but not on others, to keep things simple,
we'll only go over the most useful wildcard, the asterisk (*).
     When using FTP and many other programs you can use the wildcard "*" to mean
"any group of characters". Thusly, typing

     dir l*

at the $ prompt in VMS will give you a directory of all the files that begin with the letter
"l".

     dir li*

would give you all the files that began with "li". You'll notice that in our /pub/netguides
directory, all of the files but one end in the extension .txt. The only one that doesn't end
in .txt is a duplicate (the postscript version of the saturn.txt document). So, if we were to
type

     mget *.txt

FTP would begin the process of transferring all the files that end in the extension .txt. (It
would prompt you first, "yes, no, or all?" which is in case you accidentally type a multiple
get command that would tie up your machine for a long time getting files that you didn't
want.) After the first file was transferred, the second would begin automagically. This gives
you time to maunder on down the hall and get an iced tea from the soda machine. Don't
forget to set the file type to the appropriate setting before you start mgetting or
mputting files! I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally transferred a dozen binary
files as text and ended up with garbage. If mget *.txt will get all the files ending in text,
it is only natural that mget *.* would get everything in the directory. Be careful using these
commands, especially where a lot of information is involved, remember, you have limited
disk space on SATURN and it's considered bad form to copy multiple files during business
hours (and that's business hours of the remote machine, not your business hours. While it's
midnight here, people in Australia are hard at work and they don't need you attached to the
server they're working on bogging everything down mgetting hundreds of Ren and Stimpy
wave files.

     A lot of times when people tell you where they got a really neat file, their memory
fails them as to the exact location. They might be able to remember "It's at nic.funet.fi,"
but they might not be able to remember the exact name, or even where exactly it is. For
this reason, most directories begin with a file named with some variation of 00-
INDEX.TXT. Since FTP automagically alphabetizes everything (another very useful feature
when looking for something), anything beginning with "00" will precede just about
everything else (except things that begin with "000") and it will therefore be the first file
in the directory listing. It's always a good idea to get this file first. When it's safely in your
local directory, you can shell out of FTP and look at it. To "shell" back to SATURN from
an FTP session, type

     !

You'll get your familiar $ prompt. You can now execute SATURN commands. When
you're done, typing

     exit

will take you back to your FTP session, which has been patiently waiting for you.
Shelling is sort of going away with the intention to come back, in effect saying to the FTP
session "Hold on a minute, I'll be right back." To look at your index, type

     type 00-INDEX.TXT

or whatever the index name is. The type command will read information to the screen and
let you look at it. You can press the "hold screen" button (F1) to pause. Or, you could load
it into the EVE editor if you really wanted to.
     When you're done with FTP, typing

     quit

will end the FTP session and take you back to SATURN.                       TELNET







     We have already seen that when you sit down at a terminal and log onto SATURN,
you are connected to a computer which is actually in a different room, or even building.
Using TELNET it is possible to connect, the same way, to a computer in a different state
or even country. TELNET allows "remote access" to computers around the world.
Understanding this probably requires some modification of the way you think about things.
When most people thing of a "computer" they are thinking of a desktop PC, with a monitor,
a CPU and a keyboard. "Computer" in the Internet sense of the word is usually more of a
nondescript box sitting in a closet somewhere with a dozen or a hundred terminals
connected to it. So you never really "sit down at the computer" you sit down at a terminal,
the computer is somewhere else. When using the Internet, you can often TELNET to any
machine elsewhere on the network as though it were right next to you. Perhaps an example
is in order. This summer I trundled out to Berkeley to visit some friends. While I was out
there, I used TELNET to connect to SATURN and read my e-mail and use the various
system resources that I needed. Although I was 5,000 miles away I was able to access my
account here as though I were on campus.
     Now, you might be saying "This is great, but I only have the one account. I don't
need to access a remote computer. Here is where things get good ─ many places have
services set up that people can TELNET to much in the same way as anonymous FTP
works. Many libraries have their card-catalogues "on line." Many of these are on the
Internet. So for what it's worth, you can TELNET to the University of Miami and see if
they happen to have a copy of Dr. Mitchell's book, Less Than Words Can Say. Savitz
library is on-line, and you can TELNET there to see if they have the particular book that
you're looking for. We'll TELNET to the Savitz library as an example.
     There are two ways to start up the TELNET program and tell it what to connect to.
The first (and easiest way) is to type

     telnet computer.to.telnet.to

at the $ prompt. This will promptly take you to where you want to be. The second way
is to start the TELNET program by typing

     telnet

at the $ prompt. When TELNET has loaded, your prompt will look like this

     telnet>

and from this prompt you can type

     open computer.to.telnet.to

to access whatever computer you're looking for. You could also type

     quit

to get back to SATURN's friendly $ prompt.

     As an example, we will look at a TELNET session which will connect us to the
SAVITZ library. Typing

     telnet heroes.rowan.edu

will initiate the session. The computer will respond with something like

     trying 150.250.1.15
     connected to HEROES
     Escape character is '^]'.


     Rowan College of New Jersey Administrative VAXcluster

     Welcome to OpenVMS v6.0


     Username: SAVITZ
       Last interactive login on Thursday, 30-DEC-1993 22:31

     System Login procedure 30-DEC-1993 22:32:45.61

     User Login Procedure 30-DEC-1993 22:32:46.45
       This is node HULK

It is technobabble like this that keeps computer consultants in business. There are only
really two things here of any immediate merit, the first is the notice that the "escape
character" is "^]" (the carrot, ^ stands for ctrl, btw) and the second is the Username
prompt. The "escape character" is what we would type to end the TELNET session and get
us back to SATURN. Remember, the TELNET program itself is running on SATURN, so
any keystrokes that we type are seen by TELNET first. The escape character is usually ^],
which is because it is a key combination which is hardly ever used in any other program,
so there would be no legitimate need to type it somewhere else. If the escape character were
something like ^Z, something that gets used a lot, people would never be able to TELNET
anywhere. The Username prompt is important because it demonstrates how facilities will
often set up "special services" you can access via TELNET. You might see a pointer in
USENET that says "TELNET to quark.ork.foo and login as SPAM to access this way-cool
service."
     Many TELNET services will include a "port address" which is an additional number
after the computer's name. The "port" allows a facility to set up numerous services which
can be reached through the specification of this unique address. TELNETting to port 79 on
most computers will give you the equivalent of a FINGER command for example.
     TELNET allows you to access many different types of services such as MUD's,
Libraries, and Information databases. For example:

The PENpages, a database maintained by Penn State University. There's all sorts of
     interesting information here, weather, agricultural info, etc. TELNET to
     psupen.psu.edu and log in as PNOTPA.

Geographic Name Server, a database which contains census (1980 at last check) info on
     American cities. You can search by town name, by zip code and a few other ways.
     It'll tell you that Elmer has 971 people living in it. Way cool. TELNET to
     martini.eecs.umich.edu 3000.

Food and Drug Administration BBS. You can look over congressional testimony, AIDS
     info, or news on recent FDA approvals. TELNET to fdabbs.fda.gov and log in as
     BBS.

Ham Radio Operators. Who the heck is N2FDV? Well, you can TELNET to
     callsign.cs.buffalo.edu 2000 and find out. This service gives you names, addresses,
     and call signs of Ham Radio operators.

This is only a skeletal example of what is out there. You can find more in various Internet
guides or on USENET. The Yanoff List of Special Connections is kept current and posted
to the USENET group news.answers.                                   EVE







     In your dealings with SATURN, you will quickly come to realize that you need
some way to handle text ─ some way in which to read text documents, and some way in
which to create text documents. Of course those crafty guys who put SATURN together
thought of all this, this spiffy computer comes complete with a spiffy text editor, which is
sort of a word processor, but not as complicated. This is the same editor you had better
be using for e-mail, and it's the one that you'll use for USENET posts, so it's important
to pay attention.
     EVE is not an Internet utility, it is a VMS program. There are several text editors
available for VAXen, EVE is the easiest to use. Lucky you. EVE can be used to write
computer programs, letters, USENET posts, read instruction files, all sorts of lovely things.
It is invoked simply from the $ prompt by typing:

     EVE

You will see a screen which looks something like this:

_
[End of file]










________________________________________________________________
Buffer: filename                           |Write|Insert|Forward


The underscore is (of course) your cursor, the [End of file] marker is the end of the
file. Basically now you just type, and press ctrl-z to save and exit when you're done. It's
about that simple. Of course, there will be things that you want to do from time to time,
like centering a line for example, or saving your document or whatnot ... to perform any
command, press PF4, this gives you a "command line" at the bottom of the screen, where
EVE is waiting for you to tell it what to do. Let's go over an example.
     We'll say that you're going to write a paper for Dr. Viedersplats using EVE and that
you're going to e-mail it to him when you're done (and since the paper topic is "10 Ways
to Save Trees" I'm sure he'll appreciate the e-mail), but since you expect the document to
be exceptional, you want to keep a copy, and maybe revise it and send it to Mother Jones
when you're done. We'll start at the $ prompt. You can either type EVE at the $ prompt
and name your file later, or you can type EVE and follow it with a filename ... either one
works, but since all files have to have a name, we might as well name ours when we start
out. Type

     EVE trees.txt

You'll get the editing screen that I've already described. You will see at the bottom, the
current filename, trees.txt. The first thing we want to do is center our title. So we
type the line

     10 Ways To Save Trees

and then we're going to tell EVE that we want this line centered. Press PF4, which will
give you a command line at the bottom of the screen. At this command line type

     CENTER LINE

and press return. There you go. A centered line.
     Pressing ctrl-z will save your document and end the editing session.
     Now that you have the format for entering commands, you're basically set, since
they're all entered the same way. (There are however two keys that you should take note
of, they are very useful, these are the SELECT and REMOVE keys. Fortunately, the do
basically exactly what you'd expect them to do, select text, and remove text. The select
button is also very useful in cutting and pasting text (works just like in a word processor).
Try moving the cursor to the beginning of your line and pressing SELECT, them move the
cursor ─ neato, the selected text is highlighted! Now of course whatever command you enter
will affect the highlighted text (like CUT, or DELETE, or whatnot.))
     If you reach an impasse and are reduced to periods of agonizing and largely
unproductive umphallaskepsis, racking your brain for some command or other that you
forgot, pressing PF4 and then type

     HELP

will allow you to access EVE's on line help. The whole program is fairly straightforward
and most people don't have much of a problem using it.
     There are also herds of really serious things that EVE can do that go way beyond
the scope of this text. EVE can probably do just about anything you want it to. I have
included some more advanced commands, working with multiple documents and windows
─ most of these are optional. The simple commands that everyone should know, I've
prefaced with a bullet ().
     (NOTE: Some of the commands deal with buffers. Just think of a buffer as a file or
document which is in the computer's memory. When you "open" a buffer, what you're
doing is taking out a sheet of (virtual) paper and looking at it. The buffer (sheet of paper)
may have something written on it, it may not. You can write things on them, change them,
etc.. Many of the "buffer" commands below deal with EVE's ability to have more than one
document in memory at a time. These commands allow you to switch between several
documents ("buffers"), or even to have two of them on the screen at the same time.)



                 Some useful commands follow:


BOTTOM             Takes you to the bottom of the document.

CENTER LINE         Centers the current line.

COPY               Copies the selected range of text. (That would be the
                    highlighted text.)

CUT           Cuts the selected range of text. You can then PASTE it somewhere.

DCL command_name    Allows you to enter a VMS command. DCL stands for Digital
                    Command Language. The up side of this is that you can type
                    DCL dir *.txt or whatever, and you'll get a listing (in a
                    window) of all the files in your directory that end in the
                    extension .txt. You can enter any VMS DCL command from
                    this prompt. (Hoo boy.)

DELETE BUFFER       Deletes a buffer. Typing this will get you a prompt asking for
                    a buffer name to be deleted, give it a buffer name. EVE will
                    then ask you what to do, write the file then delete it, or just
                    delete it? or what? Type delete_only to delete the buffer
                    without saving.

EXIT               In case you become wounded by sniper fire and are unable to
                    press ctrl and z at the same time, typing this will do exactly
                    the same thing.

FIND               Searches through the document for the specified text string.
                    Staggeringly useful, especially if it's a really long text file.

GO TO marker_name   Goes to a particular book mark. (Typing GO TO STUPID will
                    move the cursor to the book mark called STUPID.)

INCLUDE FILE       Gets a file from your directory and plops it where the cursor
                    is. Horrendously useful.

INSERT PAGE BREAK   Inserts a "hard page break" (if you don't know what this is,
                    then chances are you don't need it ... this is only useful too if
                    you're printing your document out and if you're going to do
                    that, WordPerfect beats EVE hands down.)

LOWERCASE           Changes the case of selected text to lowercase.

MARK marker_name    Puts a "bookmark" at the cursor, which is given the name you
                    specify. (Therefore typing MARK STUPID will create
                    bookmark called STUPID. This is really useful when you then
                    use the GO TO command.)

NEXT BUFFER         Switches to the next open document. (This is sort of like the
                    SHIFT-F3 command in WordPerfect.) In EVE you can have
                    bunches of documents open at the same time, say a letter to
                    your mom, a paper on the care and feeding of Lemurs, and
                    notes for your Survey of American Literature class, you can
                    move forward through these by typing NEXT BUFFER.
                    Conversely, the command PREVIOUS BUFFER takes you to
                    the one before it.)

ONE WINDOW          Same as TWO WINDOWS but backwards.

PASTE              Just like CUT, but backwards.

PREVIOUS BUFFER     Just like NEXT BUFFER but backwards.

QUIT               Writing an irate letter to Dr. Viedersplats and realize half way
                    through that you still haven't gotten a grade from him? Typing
                    this will end the editing session without saving what you have
                    written.

REFRESH            Sometimes the screen gets cluttered (you got a TALK request,
                    mail, something.) Entering this command will clean it up for
                    you. Pressing ctrl-w also works.

REPLACE string      Will search through your document and do a find and replace.
                    Say you want to replace the name Dr. Viedersplats with Dr.
                    Smith. Type REPLACE Dr. Viedersplats and press return.
                    EVE will prompt you for the new string, type in Dr. Smith.
                    EVE will then ask you what ones you want to replace. You'll
                    probably want to replace them ALL. This is really useful.

SAVE FILE AS        Just like on a Macintosh. Allows you to save the file with a
                    different file name.

SAVE FILE          Remember how everybody is always telling you to save your
                    file all the time in case something is struck by lightning? This
                    is how you do it. Entering this command will save your file
                    without ending the editing session.

SELECT ALL          Just like on your Macintosh ─ this command highlights all the
                    text in the current buffer. Do as you will with it.

SELECT             I suppose this is in the event that you spill a soda on your
                    SELECT button and it ceases to function properly.

SET LEFT MARGIN     Does what you would expect. Default is 1. (Again this is
                    mostly useful if you intend to print directly from EVE.)

SET RIGHT MARGIN    Same thing, but backwards. (Default is 79)

SET TABS AT         Type the numbers for tabs, separate them by spaces. Kind of
                    a useful thing to have. (I set mine at 5, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60,
                    and 70)

TOP                Takes you to the top of the document. (You were expecting
                    something else maybe?)

TWO WINDOWS         This splits the screen in two halves so that you can edit two
                    documents at once (hey neato). Switch between the windows by
                    entering the OTHER BUFFER command.

UPPERCASE           Same as LOWERCASE but backwards.

WHAT LINE           Tells you what line you're currently on. Helpful if your
                    document has to be of a certain length.


PRINTING A FILE
     What's the use of having a word processor if you can't print? Well you can print.
From the friendly $ prompt, you can type

     print filename

and the line printer in room 311 will start spitting out your file. If you're anywhere else on
campus, too bad, it'll still print out on the line printer in room 311. If you need to print to
a different printer it can be done (there are lots of ways all of which are esoteric), ask
someone who looks like they know what they're doing.                                   IRC







     IRC, or Internet Relay Chat has become something of the bane of the Internet. It is
a high use, low return program with dubious benefits. Why mention it then? Because for
some reason, IRC tends to be very popular. IRC is sort of like an Internet version of CB
radio with unlimited channels. The up side of IRC is that it allows people from all over the
world to meet other people from all over the world and gives them the opportunity to talk
about anything. There is an irrefutable charm in that. The down side of IRC is that the
worthwhile exchange of information rarely occurs. The average mind set that you are likely
to find on IRC is that of a 7th-8th grade lunchroom with no chaperons. Sexual innuendo
abounds, and is rarely subtle. Witlessness abounds as well in an equally overt manner. Oh
well. In it's conception, IRC is a wonderful idea and well implemented. The educational
possibilities of IRC are astounding, but it tends to fall short on the user end. It is sort of like
giving a Ferrarri to a group of chimpanzees: They'll pull off the windshield wipers and squat
inside it when it rains, but not much else. Rather than go into detail about how to use IRC,
I'm going to include a brief transcript of an IRC session and then mention a few of the basic
commands and let interested parties figure out the rest by themselves.
     In order for IRC to function, two things are necessary, a client and a server. Clients
are software which connect to servers (which are both hardware and software). When you
boot up (that is "run") the client program, you have to tell it where it's connecting and what
to do with you when you get there. (The nearest IRC server is hertz.njit.edu at the New
Jersey Institute of Technology. This is the one we will be using.) The client will also want
to know your "nickname," the name you will be using on Internet Relay Chat. In this
example, I use my first name. Alright campers, from the $ prompt....



$ irc kyle hertz.njit.edu 6667



Internet Relay Chat - VMS Client 1.7.5

===================


Use DEFINE IRCNAME "Your real name" to predefine this...


Personal name? [Kyle Cassidy]

[ENTER]

*** Local VMS IRC Client version 1.7.5
*********************************************************
*****
*** This Client was last modified Dec  1 1993 20:20:59
*** Welcome to the Internet Relay Network kyle
*** Your host is hertz.njit.edu, running version 2.8.16
*** Your host is hertz.njit.edu, running version 2.8.16
*** This server was created Nov 11 1993 at 18:43:43 EST
*** Your host is hertz.njit.edu, running version 2.8.16
*** There are 1776 users and 694 invisible on 132 servers
*** There are 88 operator(s) online
*** There have been 831 channels formed
*** I have 19 clients and 1 servers
*** Motd: - hertz.njit.edu Message of the Day -
*** - ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
*** -             N.J.I.T
*** - New Jersey Institute of Technology
*** -  Computer Services Department
*** -
*** - Student run, institute supported irc server
*** - Thanks for using NJIT's own irc server.
*** -
*** - Hertz users: Sharing accounts is now in direct
*** -  violation of the regulations imposed by CSD
*** -  Unix System administration.  Anyone found sharing
*** -  an account will be immedeatly reported to the
*** - CSD for disciplinary action. Please do not risk
*** - IRC at NJIT be doing this.
*** -
*** - Type /help NJITrules for more infmormation.
*** - ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
*** End of /MOTD command.
*********************************************************
*****

/list                    [This is a command to get a listing of
                         available channels.]

#cyrano:       1
#Toofarie      4  The Toof is IN
#Mertz         1
#england       17 well i don't like gerbils that like
ferrets liking gerbils
#sabah         2
#chineese      24
#medan         10
#Sutomo        3    Welcome to #sumoto
#taiwan        36  Cuz I've fallen In love with you...
Again...
#taipei        10 telnet 140.120.1.4 login: bbs
#taichung      2
#internex      6
#p/g           5  panacea-passion pure! i can't Resist your
Gentle lure!
#inudo         31 Final & dooms Rules :P
#fillipino     20 machaco i love you -tik
#talk          24 invasion repulsed!

                         [There are actually a lot more channels than
                         this. The number after the channel name is
                         the number of people on that channel. The
                         label after that is the "topic" of discussion on
                         that channel. Be warned: The topic rarely
                         corresponds with anything you will find
                         within....]

/join #england

*** change: kyle has joined this Channel (#england)
*** Topic on channel #england is well i don't like gerbils
that like ferrets liking gerbils

#englan* kyle @Steve2 @RickMears VIEQUES @tigs @Bud-D stimpy
@Joop @BEEKeR @othernick @Bsexy @Ferret @VIGIlant Jay
@TEXWOLF @christina @Polona @cypher

                    [These are the nicknames of everyone on the
                    channel.]

(Ferret) bye tex
(BEEKeR) me hops around saying happy christmas and a merry
new ywar!!!
*** Action: christina ain't leaving yet
(christina) heheeh
(Stimpy) kyle hello?
(tigs) happy hannukah
(TEXWOLF) And if i do not see you before then Merry
Christmas and happy new ywar.
(christina) I have a final tomorrow.
(christina) french final
*** Ferret changed the topic on channel #england to wrong
topic
(VIEQUES) I am fro Puerto Riico so I have no one here was
racist agains Puertorricans
(Bud_D) how are you?
*** Action: christina needs to go
*** Action: christina waves to all
(christina) bye bye bye bye

/quit Leaving
$


This is a fairly adequate representation of what IRC is like. You can see that whatever
anyone types is printed and prefaced by their nickname, commands are prefaced by a slash
(/). If you want to experiment with it, below are a very few IRC commands. The remainder
of them you can find out easily enough on IRC itself.


/help          This is, of course the on line help.

/list          This command will list the channel names and subjects.

/join          Joins a particular channel. The channel name must be preceded by a
               pound symbol (#). You can be on more than one channel at a time,
               but it's very confusing.

/part          Leaves a particular channel. Channel name must be preceded by a
               pound symbol (#).

/quit          Quits IRC.

/who           By itself, /who will give you the names and e-mail addresses of
               everyone on IRC (and this takes forever). Used more accurately, it
               can be useful. /who nick_name will give you the name and
               address of whoever is using that nickname. /who site_name will
               give you a list of people logged in from a particular site. Thus /who
               grod will tell you the name and e-mail address of the person logged
               into IRC under the nickname "grod" and /who
               saturn.rowan.edu will give you a list of everyone who is on
               IRC from SATURN.

/nick          Changes your nickname. Typing /nick george would change my
               nickname to george.Things That Your Mother
 Should Have Taught You
About the VMS Operating System








     Raising a child is a difficult thing to do, what with diapers and formula, preschool,
little league and proms. I'm going to assume that your mother forgot to tell you some things
about VMS that she ought to have. Be forewarned, this is only the briefest of outlines. The
actual manuals for VMS come on a forklift (no foolin) and are known by the sobriquet
"The Big Grey Wall", because they're grey and take up an entire wall (the skeleton set
takes up 15 shelf feet.) Bruce Klein has a set of them in his office if you feel like staring
in awe at them.


HELP
     Keep this one in mind. VMS has on-line help including examples which can save
you a lot of time and blundering about. HELP is simple to use. So simple in fact, that I
don't need to tell you anymore about it.


THE WAY VMS NAMES FILES
     Filenames in VMS make strange sense. The format looks like this:

     filename.extension;version_number

where the "version number" is a number which gives you information on the files revision
status. Say you were writing a report on the history of the paper clip. You might have
several versions of the report, one that is 10,000 words long, one that you've trimmed down
to 5,000 words, and one with a different conclusion that you're not sure you like. VMS will
let you name these files:

     paper.clip;1
     paper.clip;2
     paper.clip;3

I happen to have a myriad of project.txt files, with witty little quips in them that I
change from time to time in order to keep people who are FINGERing me from getting
bored. They are saved as

     project.txt;1
     project.txt;2

etc. Which is actually convenient and makes sense. (In DOS you would probably name
them "project.one," "project.two," "project.thr," etc.)

     In naming a file under VMS you can use 39 characters for the file name and 39
characters for the extension name. The extension name must be preceded with a period. The
characters can be from a-z, upper or lower case, the numbers from 0-9, and the underscore,
hyphen, or the dollar sign character. So, a legal file name could be:

     this_is_my_file.it-is-number-9;9


WILDCARDS IN FILES
     Wildcards in VMS work just like they do in DOS. The most useful one is the
asterisk (*) which means "anything." The command

     dir l*.*;3

will give you a directory of all the files that begin with the letter "L" and have a version
number of "3." The percent symbol (%) is a wildcard standing for "any single character"
therefore

     dir %ina.txt;1

will display the file nina.txt;1 but not the file cognomina.txt;1.


DELETE
     Works just like you'd expect it to. You've got to include the version number, even
if it's the only file with that name. Example:

     delete this.file;1


PURGE
     The purge command will delete all the files in your directory with multiple version
numbers saving only the last two.


RENAME
     This command will do just what you'd expect, give an old file a new name.

     rename old.file;1 new.file;1

will rename the file old.file;1 to new.file;1. This is useful if you want to keep a
bunch of witty text files around and use them as project.txt files, you can RENAME
the one you want to use.


SEEING WHO'S ON
     The command

     show users

will clue you in as to who's using SATURN at the same time you are.


SPAWN This is an astoundingly useful process which allows you to suspend one thing
     you're doing in VMS and start something else. The most useful example is when
     you're using NEWS, which takes so long to boot, and you get a TALK request.
     Instead of quitting from news, you can type

          spawn

     at the NEWS> prompt. This will give you a $ prompt, you can answer your TALK
     request etc. When you are done type

          continue

     to take you back to NEWS. (Or you can simply log out from that session, you'll
     return to news.) You can also type things like

          spawn mail

     which would take you directly to the MAIL> prompt.


DIRECTORIES IN VMS
     SATURN, like all good computers, allows you to create directories, which makes
things easier to find. For example we'll look at the directory tree of an arbitrary account:

               ROOT
                ■
                │
                ├──■ SPSS stuff
                │
                │
                ├──┐ Text Files
                │  │
                │  │
                │  ├──■ Reports
                │  │
                │  │
                │  └──┐ Letters
                │     │
                │     │
                │     └──■ Letters to Mom
                │
                │
                └──■ ASCII Art

This account has three directories in it, "SPSS stuff," "Text Files," and "ASCII ART." One
of these directories "Text Files" has two subdirectories, "Reports" and "Letters." The
subdirectory "Letters" has a subdirectory itself, "Letters to Mom." Therefore, if you knew
that you had written mom a letter and you had it somewhere,
text_files.letters.letters_to_mom would be a good place to start looking for
it, conversely, your report on Wisconsin Cheese production facilities might be found in
text_files.reports. The proper use of directories allows you to pigeonhole things
and keep them organized. In DOS, which I am going to assume you have some familiarity
with, there are two main directory related commands, these are

md "Make Directory"
cd "Change Directory"

also, it is fairly easy to make DOS show you what directory you are in. VMS is not nearly
as nice to you. By the end of this chapter you will be praying for the simplicities of DOS.
Sorry, but that's the way it is. (In fact, I've a feeling that DIGITAL probably fires engineers
if they do something in a reasonable fashion.) If you want VMS to show you what directory
you are in, you type

     show default

at the $ prompt (no kidding.) SATURN will respond with the directory path.
     I'll briefly go over the VMS equivalents to the DOS commands md and cd.


CREATING A DIRECTORY
     To create a directory use the command

     create/directory [directory.name]

at the $ prompt. If you are creating a subdirectory off of your root directory you don't
need the whole directory path name

     create/directory [.name]

will work in that case.


CHANGING A DIRECTORY
     You change a directory with the command:

     set default [.directory_name]

Makes a whole lot of sense doesn't it? To move "up" in the directory structure, you type

     set default [-]


COPYING FILES
     Works just like in DOS. Typing

     copy [-.stuff]*.*

will copy everything from the directory [-.stuff] to the current directory.                       How To Call SATURN From Home







     All this Internet stuff is great, but you don't feel like huddling in the back of 311
all day long hunched over a terminal? You'd rather be home hunched over a terminal where
at least you can listen to your Bauhaus albums if you feel like it right? Well, if you have
a modem, and terminal emulation software (QVT works nicely for both Macintosh and
IBM) or better yet, a genuine terminal, you can call in and do Internet stuff from home. Set
your modem up for 8 bits, 1 stop, no parity and dial 863-5959. You can connect at speeds
up to the blistering rate of 2400 baud. After you connect to the server you'll be prompted

     username>

this is basically a hoax ─ you can type anything here, as long as it is at least one character
long. After this, you will be rewarded with a

     local>

prompt. Type

     c saturn

which stands for "connect saturn." You'll know what to do from there. Sometimes, for
reasons unknown to anyone, you will be unable to connect. The modems may connect but
you will not receive data, or you may receive a bundle of garbage. The only thing to do is
hangup, wait a few minutes and try again. My experience has been that this problem will
correct itself if left alone.
     Be forewarned that in calling in via modem, unless you are using a genuine terminal,
you might not be able to do some of the things you're used to. Terminal emulators range
from awful to egregious.
     If you use QVT the "-" key on the keypad replaces the PF4 key. (Remember that,
it's important for using things like EVE.) There's also a version of QVT for the Macintosh
that has pull down function keys.
     When you are done using SATURN, log out in the normal fashion and also log out
from the local> prompt in the same way. ARCHIE:
 Finding What's Out There







WHAT IS ARCHIE?
     FTP opens up worlds of information. If you've spent any time peering through the
lists of downloadable software you know just how much is out there.  Whatever you want,
chances are you can FTP it from somewhere. Unfourtionately in a world this big you can't
always rely on things being interesting to find. If you have a problem with your terminal
emulator you might call Academic Computing for help....

     "Hello, Academic Computing."
     "Hi, I'm having problems with my terminal emulator. The menu hangs whenever I
try and load it."
     "Oh yes, that's a common problem. You really ought to be using QVT. Get yourself
a copy of that. It will solve all your problems.""Oh. Great. Where do I get it?"
     "Oh, you can just FTP it from somewhere."
     "Where?"
     "Oh, anywhere. Thanks for calling. Bye."

     While the folks at A.C. are actually much nicer than this it's a good example because
on USENET you're bound to see people say things like "I found a great graphics utility
called qpeg.exe it rules! It's available by anonymous FTP from somewhere. I forget where."
     FTP is incomprehensibly huge, uncounted gigabytes of information are available
through it. Many FTP sites have a table of contents of sorts, in the way of 00-index.txt
files but what FTP really needs is a bona fide global index, one that allows you to say
"where is this qpeg.exe that I've heard so much about?" Well, lucky for all of us, some
people at Mcgill University in Canada were more irked by this than you and I and they
actually invented one.
     ARCHIE is a really easy to use service that will find files for you and tell you where
to get them. This is so amazingly useful that after you try it out you'll probably want to send
the people at Mcgill who invented it a Wisconson cheese sampler from Hickory Farms or
something.


HOW TO USE ARCHIE
     ARCHIE is one of those things that you telnet to. There are a bunch of Archie servers
now, any one of them will do, though it's usually considered nicest to call the one closest
to you.


archie.ans.netNew Yorkarchie.auAustraliaarchie.doc.ic.ac.ukEnglandarchie.funet.fiFinlandarchie.mcgill.caCanadaarchie.rutgers.eduNew Jerseyarchie.sura.netMarylandarchie.unl.eduNebraska

     My experience has been though that archie.rutgers.edu, while the closest, is also the
slowest. I've gotten excellent results with archie.funet.fi which is in Finnland.

     telnet archie.funet.fi

     Trying...128.214.6.102

     Connected to ARCHIE.FUNET.FI.

     Escape character is '^]'.


     SunOS UNIX (archie.funet.fi)


     login:

at this prompt, type

     archie

This is one of those examples where people will say "Telnet to archie.rutgers.edu and login
as archie." You'll see a startup message and a prompt

     # Bunyip Information Systems, 1993


     # Unable to open terminal description file.
     # `erase' character is `^?'.
     # `search' (type string) has the value `sub'.
     archie>

if you want, you can type help to get a help file.

     help

which will give you

     These are the commands you can use in help:

          .              go up one level in the hierarchy

          ?              display a list of valid subtopics at
                         the current level

          done, ^D, ^C   quit from help entirely

          <string>       help on a topic or subtopic Eg.

          "help show"    will give you the help screen for the
                         "show" command

          "help set search"   Will give you the help information
                              for the "search" variable.

          "manpage"      will give you a complete copy of the
                         archie manual page.

     help>

press [return] all by itself to get out of help and get back to the

     archie>

prompt. The command "prog" means "find the program called" so if we were looking for
qvt.exe, we would type

     prog qpeg

"But wait!" you are no doubt protesting, "We're looking for qpeg.exe, not qvt!" And the
answer to that is that the program, wherever it is archived, is probably not called qpeg.exe,
it's probably called qpeg13.zip or something like that. Unless you specifically tell ARCHIE
to ignore everything that doesn't exactly match your request, it will return partial matches,
which is heinously useful if you're not completely sure of the name. Our search will result
as follows:


     # Search type: sub.

     # Your queue position: 1
     # Estimated time for completion: 00:18
     working...


     Host ftp.uni-passau.de    (132.231.1.10)
     Last updated 21:39 11 Feb 1994

         Location:
/mount/common.lib.archive2/ibmpc/msdos/pictools
           FILE    -rw-r--r--  302288 bytes  09:44 30 Nov 1993
     qpeg11c.exe


     Host ftp.tu-clausthal.de    (139.174.2.10)
     Last updated 11:15 11 Feb 1994

         Location: /pub/msdos/Newitems/qpeg12e.exe -> ../graphics
           FILE    -rwxrwxrwx      23 bytes
      22:48  9 Dec 1993  qpeg12e.exe

         Location: /pub/msdos/Newitems/qpeg12e.txt -> ../graphics
           FILE    -rwxr
     wxrwx      23 bytes  22:48  9 Dec 1993  qpeg12e.txt

although ARCHIE actually will find about 20 more copies of the various incarnations of qpeg
than that.


ARCHIE VIA E-MAIL
     One really nice thing about ARCHIE is that it will accept e-mail requests. This can
save you a lot of trouble because you can mail off your request to ARCHIE and then go to
the Stupid Center and grab a bite to eat and when you get back they'll be e-mail from
ARCHIE telling you where you can find your stuff. You also actually posess the list then,
instead of having to bang on the hold screen button all the time to try and stop the assault
of text scrolling by so fast that you have no hope of reading it.
     Send email to [e-mail] with the word help in the body of the
message (not to be confused with the subject line of the message, which should say "bring
me a lemur!" (Just kidding. You can leave the subject blank.)) A few minutes later you'll get
mail back from ARCHIE with all sorts of help in it.
Getting Files To Your Home
Computer







     "How do I get files to my home computer from the Internet?
     Ah! what a brilliant question. Why did it take me so long to getting around to
answering it? Obviously free software from the Internet is absolutely useless to you if you
can't get it off the VAX and onto your home or office computer. Look as you might, you
will find not legitimate place to stick a floppy disk on your VT-220 (though with some
coersion you might manage to ram it through the vent on the top but that won't do anyone
any good and you'll never be able to get it back out).  It becomes evident now that to
transfer a program from SATURN to a floppy disk that we need something in between the
program and the floppy disk that has a disk drive. Whatever this something is, it must be
connected by wire to SATURN. There are two ways of doing this, the first way is to find
a PC that is on the network (any network as long as it's connected to the Internet ─ so it
could be a machine at clam.rutgers.edu or it could be a PC in 325 on the MARS local area
network.) or it could be a computer connected to the VAX via a modem.
     In the first instance, using a PC on a network, you already have all the information
you need to get your file to a disk but you might not have figured it out (sort of like Dorothy
and the Ruby Slippers). Let's say that you found the latest version of Doom, DOOM12.ZIP,
on wuarchive.wustl.edu, you've FTP'd it to SATURN and you want to get this on your
home computer. If you have access to a networked PC, say one in Robinson 325, you can
simply FTP it again from SATURN to the PC that you're sitting at. Simple.
     In the case of a modem connection, you can run a program called KERMIT (yes, it's
named after the frog) which is made for sending files across phone lines. We'll say that
you're using QVT as your terminal emulator, because you probably should be (unless you've
found something better in which case please tell us). From the friendly $ prompt, type

     run kermit

the computer will respond with a prompt that looks like this

     kermit-32>

from here type

     send doom12.zip

nothing will change. SATURN is waiting for QVT to tell it to start sending the file. In QVT,
press alt-f to get the file menu, select "download". QVT will then ask you where to put the
file, give it a directory. QVT will also want to know if the file is text or binary, since this
is a .zip file, it would be binary. After your machine is ready, it will tell SATURN to start
sending the file. Go take a shower or make some pancakes or visit your granmother in
Deluth because downloading Doom at 2400 baud is going to take a while. When the file is
done transferring, QVT ought to beep to let you know. Type

     quit

to exit KERMIT. You'll get your familiar prompt back.
     QVT is available for all sorts of platforms, DOS, WINDOWS, NT, OS/2, Macintosh.
Whatever you've got there's probably a version of QVT for you.

Conclusion:
 Where do I go from here?







     Now that you have an idea of how to use some assorted Internet tools, you'll no doubt
begin to hear about all sorts of other wonderful things that you can do. USENET and
electronic mail should help you find just about any information you're looking for.
     It was my original intention to make this book fairly comprehensive, with chapters
on WWW, the World Wide Web, GOPHER, WAIS and various other net resources. The
"truth of the matter" is that during the writing of this manual, SATURN has fallen into
disfavor and is being, in essence, put out to pasture. Most accounts will be farmed out to
Academic Computing's new server, MARS, which is a 486DX/66 running NOVELL. This
is a much slicker interface, with menus and windows and what not, but it lacks some of the
nostalgic charm of SATURN. This is both good and bad. On the one hand, I am distressed
that this project wasn't able to come to the fruition which I had planned for it (it's also
unfortunate to see your work becoming obsolete even before it hits paper), and on the other
hand MARS is considerably more powerful than SATURN and is able to handle much more
advanced software and do it more quickly (there are reasons for this which are kind of
obvious when you point them out, but since they're largely irrelevant, I'll not bother now.)
MARS represents the future ─ the simple accessibility of the Internet. Things that may have
been difficult with SATURN are rudimentary on MARS. For this reason, it's not much fun
writing a user's manual. SATURN was for me, a sort of tinker toy ─ a vast, unknowable
island, with puzzles and wonders around every corner. Those of you who are using SATURN
by choice are most likely using it for similar reasons and hopefully this guide has given you
enough knowledge that you can figure out whatever else you want to know.
     If the Internet is to be effective and successful, it must go the way of MARS ─ it
must become so easy to use that no one is daunted by it. As a clock face covers up the
complex machinery of the chronometer and allows anyone to tell time, so must our interfaces
to world-wide networks be. As it becomes easier to use the Net, more people will use it and
it will become more powerful.
     The MARS Internet manual should be considered the logical extension of this manual.
The glossary in that manual (for example) will be more comprehensive than the one found
here. That manual will also go into more depth concerning the physical being of the Internet
and the services available on it.

     In the meantime, you might want to pick up Ed Krol's wonderful book The Whole
Internet, it's chock full 'o wonderful things to do, places to go, files to get. There is also a
Brendan P. Keyhoe's book Zen and the Art of Internet which is available electronically on
the Net itself. Eric Raymond's hilarious book The New Hacker's Dictionary is also available
on line as the infamous "Jargon File;" check alt.computer.folklore for it's current
whereabouts. Be careful about buying "Internet" books in a book store ─ many of them are
just printed versions of books which were written "on the Net" and are available "on the
Net." The "list of lists" for example, which is a listing of publicly accessible mailing lists,
can be found in the USENET group news.lists. You shouldn't pay $25 for anything that you
can download for free.
     Still, keep your eyes out for updates and appendiums to this manual (there are bound
to be a few ─ there were three revisions due to software changes in the week between
10.17.1993 and 10.24.1993). There are also several places you can go for help if you are
having difficulty: There is a USENET group called rowan.support. Questions posted to that
group will be answered by somebody (or more likely, many somebodies.) Updates of this
manual will most likely be posted to the group rowan.announce. You can also send
electronic mail to the address support@gboro (nothing else is necessary in the To: field);
thirdly, you can send me e-mail and I will do my best to answer your questions.
                     Appendix A:
            How to Type Like a Cyberdweeb







     In your trek across cyberspace, you will no doubt find yourself talking "real time"
at people via your keyboard on some if not many occasions. Internet utilities such as IRC,
TALK, MUD's, MUSE's, etc. all put people in a position where such communication is
possible if not necessary. This sort of thing has been going on for years and years. Over
these years, a sort of "language" has developed, much akin to CB radio talk, where a
"smokey" is a police officer and a "rubber duck" is ... er, well, I'm sure a "rubber duck"
must mean something to a CBer.... Lots of people type entirely in lowercase, don't be
distraught, and don't pick on their grammar or spelling ... this is considered really rude on
the Net where proper punctuation and its ilk are routinely thrown to the wind in favor of
typing as fast as humanly possible. We are living in a society where until a very few years
ago it wasn't fashionable for anyone but secretaries to be able to type. The world is filled
with older people, men mostly, who never learned how and for whom the "ten fingered
interface" is alienating and intimidating. For some people, using the Internet requires a heroic
effort ─ be gentle. If that weren't enough, you will find in the course of your travels that
often times you are talking with people for whom English is not their first language - until
you speak more languages than they do, it's probably a good idea to keep your snide spelling
lessons to yourself. IT IS ALSO CONSIDERED IMPOLITE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS ─
PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU ARE SHOUTING AT THEM.
     Anyway, this is in no way a comprehensive list of the cabalistic garbage that you will
see typed at you from time to time, but it is a start and these are (as far as I know) the most
popular ones.

*    The use of asterisks usually suggests action, so typing *laugh* would mean "I am
     laughing."

ack  "Yeah." Ack stands for "acknowledge." If you send someone e-mail that says "enq?"
     and they receive it while they are on line, they may respond with "ack," meaning
     "yeah, I'm here, I'm on line. What do you want?"

brb  Technogeek for "Be Right Back." This notifies people that the typer is leaving his or
     her keyboard to attend to some business, answer the phone, go to the lavatory, order
     a pizza, etc. and have the intention of returning to the keyboard momentarily.

btw  "By the way." As in "btw, I'm getting married next May."

bye? "Are you ready to end this session?" It is never polite to just "hang up" on someone,
     i.e. leave without telling them that you are going. Typing "bye?" is polite. It is also
     polite (and I'm not kidding) to type "wave" before you disconnect. This comes from
     MUD's where typing "wave" would return the line "soandso waves."

enq? "Enquiry." This means are you busy? You may get e-mail from people saying "enq?"
     and nothing else. The proper response is "ack" or "nak."

[enter] [enter] when you are done "speaking" (typing real time) a double carriage return lets
     the other user know that you're finished and that it's okay for them to type. This isn't
     necessary on things like TALK where the screen is divided. It stems from the days
     when everyone typed on the same screen at the same time. It still makes things
     clearer though.

foaf "Friend of a friend." From alt.urban.legends (although coined elsewhere, it sees
     considerable usage there and elsewhere on the Net, so I include it.) FOAF stories are
     rarely (if ever) true, though often amusing. Read the alt.urban.legends FAQ and be
     amazed at how many of the FOAF stories you have heard and even thought true
     yourself.

foo? "Sorry I butted in." Used if you send a TALK request to someone without there
     expecting it. If they're busy the response is "sorry I'm busy" or "nak." If they are not
     busy they might respond "ack" or "what?" The origin of the word "foo" is certainly
     from "foobar." The origin of "foobar" is heatedly debated. Suffice to say that
     "foobar" basically means "anyword." It is a word that computer users sling into
     places where many words would fit, such as "Oh, I can't remember his name, Bob
     Foobar or something like that." Or "Yeah, he vanished, got a job with Foobar
     Enterprises and we haven't seen him since."

fya  "for your amusement." See "fyi."

fyi  "for your information." Example, "fyi, the budget has been increased to $22,000 as
     of last month."

ga   "go ahead" for when two people are trying to type at the same time.

hhok "ha ha only kidding"

IMHO Technogeek for "In My Humble Opinion." This is a disclaimer for opinions, such
     as "Macintoshes are far superior to IBM's, IMHO."

jam  "just a minute" Similar to "phone" and "sec."

l8r  "later" a way of saying goodbye.

morf? "Male Or Female?" When TALKing to someone, or IRCing, or MUDding, you know
     nothing about the other person (or persons) except their name (or in many cases,
     pseudonym). "morf?" is therefore a frequent question.

nak  "I'm busy." If you send someone e-mail that says "enq?" and they answer "nak" it
     means that although they are on line, they are busy and you should try them later.

o    "Over." This means, I'm done talking. Your turn. Similar to [enter] [enter].

oo   "Over and out." The same as "goodbye."

obtw "Oh, by the way." A logical extension of btw.

oic  "Oh, I see." Example: "Oic! I didn't realize that Marge and Lou were friends."

rehi "hello again." Basically anything can, and will be "re'd" you can "resmack" someone
     or "releave", or "reget."

rl   "Real Life." As opposed to computer life, or vr.

rotf "Rolling On The Floor" as in laughing. If you tell someone a funny story, they might
     type this to let you know how funny they think it is.

rtfm Technogeek for "Read the &^%$#@! Manual." Posting a message to
     comp.sys.ibm.pc which says "what's the qualifier which will print my directory wide
     rather than long?" might get you a few "rtfm!" flames in reply. It means basically
     that you are probably wasting peoples time in asking for the answer to this question
     which is readily available to anyone who cares to spend 2 minutes at the index of a
     book.

sec  "Wait a second", sometimes "phone", meaning "hold on, the phone is ringing."

tnx  "Thanks." As in "Tnx for the info."

ttfn "Ta Ta For Now" As in, "I'll be seeing you."

vr   "Virtual Reality." One's life on line, as opposed to one's physical life. Your "net
     pals" are vr friends.

wrt  "With Respect To"

Yoyodyne Mythical corporation which springs up from time to time on the Net. As in "Oh
     yeah, Telnet Bob moved to Oregon or some place. He got a job with, um, I dunno,
     Yoyodyne." In his book The Whole Internet Ed Krol uses the address
     johnbigboote@ yoyodyne.com. I am indebted to dries@gboro, who informs
     me that this comes from the film Buckaroo Banzi. Apparantly John Bigboote was the
     head alien.  Appendix B:
Computer Terms That Your Mother
Should Have Taught You







     Like many technical pursuits, computers have generated something of their own
language. Because of the intricacy of computers the language which has been developed
around them is more substantial than that which has sprung up around, say, canoeing. Below
is a very slight list of words which frequently pop from peoples mouths or keyboards. You
will hear them in conversation and see them on USENET.

backbone the high speed "main line" off of which computers are connected in a local-area-
     network. Example "Grepping across the backbone really sucks up resources, you
     shouldn't do it during peak usage hours."

big red switch The power switch on a computer or peripheral. When computers lock up or
     being to do something which there seems to be no other way to stop, "power cycling"
     or, more literally, "turning it off" may be the only way to regain control of the
     machine. Be careful in turning off a terminal which is not really a computer. While
     this may seem to fix things, chances are it will leave other jobs running that must be
     stopped. Also 120 reset (from 120 volts.)

cli  Command Line Interface. An operating system which a user interacts with by typing
     commands rather than moving a mouse or honking a series of horns of different
     pitches. VMS is a command line interface, as is DOS, CP/M and many OS's. See
     gui.

crlf Carriage Return Line Feed. Pressing the [enter] key does two things, represented by
     two separate characters, the first character, the CR brings the cursor back to the first
     column of the screen, the other character, the LF moves the cursor down a line. If
     you see someone complaining "That stupid terminal emulator doesn't even know how
     to make a proper crlf!" You'll know it has something to do with the way the [return]
     codes are being interpreted.

cyberpunk A digital warrior, internet surfer etc. The cool computer geek of the 90's. This
     is science fiction spinoff, the term was coined by SF writer Bruce Bethke when
     talking about William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. Things "cyberpunk" are Max
     Headroom and Blade Runner.

DCL  Stands for DIGITAL Command Language. It is a set of instructions by way of which
     the user can tell VMS to perform certian functions. There are over 200 commands
     and functions in DCL, only a handfull of which are understandable by human beings.

/dev/null Stands for device / null, essentially meaning "nowhere." This is UNIX jargon
     which has found its way onto the Net because most people who are using the net are
     doing so through UNIX. Often you will see people post "followups to
     alt.swedish.chief.bork.bork.bork, flames to /dev/null" meaning, "route your wicked
     comments into the cold vacuum of space, little toad of a man!"

Doom A game made by ID software, the people who made Castle Wolfenstien 3D.
     Everybody on the Internet seems to be talking about it, playing it or writing
     applications that make it run better. Sorry folks, it won't run on a VAX.

flameThe practice of sending incendiary e-mail to someone you disagree with, or posting
     same. The equivalent of shouting at someone. Posting "I love to kill cows and eat
     them!" to rec.foods.vegetarian is liable to get you flamed. You will see talk of
     "asbestos suits" when flameage is imminent. Beware of flame-baiters, people who
     will post absurd things just to get people to flame them (I speak the truth.) Some
     people have nothing better to do with their lives.

followups Someone may post a message to several newsgroups looking for information on
     a particular topic, but not want to clutter those groups with discussion, or have to go
     searching for the answer. Thusly, a thread on rec.motorcycles concerning what
     happens to an elevator in free fall might incite someone to post a message to
     sci.physics and sci.engineering.elevators asking a question and directing the
     "followups" back to rec.motorcycles where people are really interested.


foo  The term has both no meaning and much meaning, to take the Taoist approach. There
     is no agreed upon definition for the word, but it is used for everything, expecially in
     conjunction with the word bar, which has a similar null-meaning. A computer geek
     will say "Foo!" when he dropps a rock on his foot and he will say "John Q. Foobar"
     or "Foo Inc" to mean anyone or any company. Basically, foo or foobar may be
     thought of as a variable name for anyword. It is common to see names like
     [e-mail] as examples in manuals.

galactic trader This is a difficult though way-cool game that can be found on SATURN's
     BBS (type BBS from the $ prompt.) It's multi player, which means that you can play
     with a bunch of other people at the same time. I've not figured out all the rules but
     I'm always looking for people to play with :-)

gateway A computer which acts as a connection (or, "gateway") between networks. The
     purpose of a gateway is to decide where to route information, both incoming and
     outgoing. "Gateways" will often handle e-mail. GBORO is Rowan's "gateway" to the
     Internet. In the Bunce building the computer called "CHARON" is the "gateway"
     between the ELAN computer and the rest of the campus.

grep A UNIX command used to search through text doccuments. You'll frequently hear
     people on the Net saying "I had to locate 150 Shakespeare quotes for my take home
     final. I FTPd the complete works from world.std.com and I grepped the quotes out
     in about 30 seconds." VMS has a similar feature called SEARCH.

gui  Graphic User Interface. A program (usually an operating system) where commands
     are entered by manipulating a series of graphical objects on a screen, usually with a
     mouse or trackball. The Macintosh OS is a gui, as is Windows, and OS/2. Compare
     with cli.

header That portion of an e-mail message or a USENET post which contains the To: and
     From: information as well as the routing information, etc.

hork core In UNIX, an error which baffles the computer can cause a core dump. These
     result in screeds of numbers (the contents of memory) being dumped to either a file
     or the screen. You can say that a person got sick and "horked core" (vomited) or that
     your process somehow caused SATURN to "hork core" on you. The actual VMS
     term is "Register Dump". ("Horked registers" just doesn't sound right.)

job  a process which is running on a computer. The command show users /full will list
     the jobs that a VAX is running.

LAN  "Local Area Network" a group of computers connected to one another within a small
     area, usually one building.

120 reset see big red switch.

os   Short for "Operating System." The os is what's between you and the computer itself,
     the integrated circuit. It interprets your keyboard commands and causes the
     microprocessor to function in a certain way. VMS is the operating system which is
     running on SATURN. Other os's are UNIX, DOS, and the MACINTOSH OS. (Non
     sequitur: Microsoft Windows is not an operating system, although it pretends to be.
     Windows is actually a DOS program.)

postscript Sometimes seen as "ps". PostScript is a printer language spoken by (strangely
     enough) "postscript compatible printers." A postscript file can have all sorts of nifty
     doo-dads in it, things like pictures, font changes, italics, etc. all the niceties of desk
     top publishing can be put in a file and printed out on any "postscript compatible
     printer." Text files in .ps are invariably MUCH better looking than their ascii
     counterparts. They are also HUGE.

ppf  Pink Plastic Flamingo.

real time As the clock ticks. "Real Time" is the time on your watch. IRC is real-time, e-
     mail is not.

root The primary or default directory. When you say "root" you actually mean the
     "system" directory (which you certainly don't have access to), but saying "I left it in
     my root directory will be understood by all to mean that the file is to be found in the
     lowest level of your directory structure. Also home directory or $home directory.

router "Router," "Gateway," it's all the same. See gateway.

.sig (also .signature) A short file which is appended to electronic mail and USENET
     posts. Sig's or "signature's" usually contain something about the poster, how to reach
     them via e-mail, some particular interest they might have, or some nifty ascii art.
     Some .sig's are interminably long and very annoying. With some fiddling, ANU news
     will append them, or you could just keep a file called "sig" in your home directory
     and INCLUDE FILE it at the end of your message or post.

smiley From time to time you'll see someone stick a :-) in a USENET post or in e-mail.
     This might seem a bit odd at first. If you tilt your head to the left about 90° you
     may see a smiley face. These are used to designate humor and let people know when
     you're joking in a world where people can't see your expression. Example: "Well
     Ralph, you never did have any taste in computers :-)" Other
     popular smilies are :) :-O and the "sad" smiley :-( My personal favorite is the
     "punk" smiley with the mohawk --:-) Okay. So it's a little goofy. One more
     point, no one seems to know how to punctuate smileys, as adding a comma, or
     period or right paren to them would change the way they look. The best way is to
     just leave the punctuation out. Somewhere out there is a HUGE document of many
     many smileys. Quite a few of them are extremely creative.

snail mail The old fashioned paper variety mail which takes so long to arrive. The pun is
     on "U.S. Snail" ─ I mean "mail." Internet users (rightly) assume that no mail should
     take more than 10 minutes to be delivered

switch A modifier in a command. In the command

          show users /full

     "show users" is the command, and "/full" is the switch. Switches make commands
     much more versitile. Also "qualifier."

thread The continuing topic of conversation in a USENET group. "Threads" are usually
     distinguished by their sameness of titles, mostly prefaced by RE:. Example:
     "Rec.motorcycles is fun to read, but I get bored every time they start up that old
     helmet thread again."

UNIX A computer operating system very popular among computer geeks and cyberpunks
     alike. It was invented by a variety of entities. Notably among them, Berkeley
     University, and AT&T. It is generally accepted wisdom that UNIX is better than
     VMS.

unsupported feature A program or portion of a program that the maintainers no longer
     spend any time maintaining ─ usually due to obsolescence. SATURN, for example,
     has a BBS, you can type BBS at the $ prompt, but if you have problems with it, no
     one will help you; the feature is unsupported. The Internet is chock full 'o
     unsupported features.

VAX  Virtual Address Extension. (Oh, of course.) The VAX is a variation of the PDP
     (Programmable Data Processor) designed by DIGITAL in 1978. According to the
     New Hackers Dictionary, there is also a vacuum cleaner company in England called
     VAX, their motto "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" is often touted by computer users.
     The VAX uses a 32 bit processor and "virtual" memory ("Pah!" you say, "so does
     my 486!" But can you have 28 people logged onto it at once? I didn't think so,
     smarty pants.) which has made it the most popular computer in the history of the
     world. The plural of VAX is VAXen.

VMS  The standard VAX operating system. VMS stands for "Virtual Memory System"
     whatever that means.Appendix C:
Solutions to Frequently Discovered Problems







Oh great and powerful VMS oracle, I have traveled long up this difficult path. I beseech you
please answer my questions!


Q:   I'm calling in from home and nothing seems to work. I connect, but when I type
     menu the machine just hangs.

A:   You're probably using the wrong terminal emulator. Get a copy of QVT.


Q:   When I type MAIL, I don't get the EVE screen you say I should, I just get a stupid
     "*" at the bottom of the screen and I can't make heads or tails of it.

A:   You've got the wrong editor selected. The "*" goes with EDT. At the MAIL>
     prompt, type

          set editor tpu

     to make everything better.


Q:   I can't load news! Whenever I try, SATURN horks core all over me.

A:   Try typing

          show quota

     this will tell you if you've used up all your alloted disk space. If you have, delete
     something. If you haven't (meaning that you still have free space left) try deleting
     your NEWS.RC file, this is drastic action. The NEWS.RC file is SATURN's record
     of what you like to read, what you have read, what you'll be likely to read tomorrow.
     If you delete this file it may get you up and running, but all the messages you've read
     in NEWS will be marked Unread. Oh well.


Q:   When I type show users /full I see that I'm logged on seventeen times! How
     is this possible?

A:   You forgot to log out. Rather, you turned off the computer, hung up the modem or
     whatever. You've got to stop these ghost processes which are running around
     SATURN like Hamlet's father. When you type show users note the process names
     (the first one should be your name, the others will be something like _LTA6671. At
     the $ prompt type

          stop process_name

     and do this until you've killed them all like rats in a barrel. Don't be discouraged if
     you accidentally kill your active process, just log in again. Keep up the good work
     soldier.


Q:   When I try to finger my uncle Frodo at the National Security Agency I get a
     connect: connection refused message. Is their computer broken? Should
     I send mail to [e-mail] and tell them?

A:   Some places consider FINGER to be a security problem. Some places don't want
     anybody to know when their users last logged in, or if they're logged in right now
     or how long they've been away from their computer. Many places don't allow
     fingering for these reasons. Sorry, but you'll just have to suffer.


Q:   I sent a talk request to my uncle Frodo, but he didn't answer. What gives?

A:   Some systems don't have the TALK program installed. Have Frodo check with his
     system admnistrator to make sure they have access to TALK and make sure that
     they're using "ntalk" (new talk) as opposed to old talk.


Q:   I accidentally deleted the wrong file. Can I undelete it?

A:   No. But if it was really important, it might have been saved in the backup. Each night
     at 1:00 am SATURN does a tape backup of all it's files. Quick as a bunny send a
     note to Bruce Klein and let him know that you need a file restored. If the file didn't
     exist at 1 am on that morning, forget it.
                          Bibliography







Bynon, David W., Mastering VMS, Professional Press Inc, Horsham Pa, 1990
     Bynon's book is good. It's obvious that he knows his stuff. I reccommend it for those
     of you who reach that moment of epiphiny where you say "Hey! VMS sort of makes
     sense!" There's a picture of him on the back of the book, where he looks like he's
     not quite getting a joke that someone's telling. Unfourtionately he doesn't look like
     the sort of person you'd want to invite to a party, but you never know.

digital equipment corporation, VMS User's Manual (for VMS version 5.2), (Order Number:
     AA-LA98B-TE), digital equipment corporation, 1989
     This is a huge, semi-useful, though entirely stoic reference manual. The coolest thing
     about it is that it was produced with the VAX DOCUMENT electronic publishing
     system, using terminals for crying out loud the poor slobs who wrote it typeset the
     darned thing in ascii instead of going out and spending $2000 lousy bucks on a
     Macintosh and doing it in FrameMaker, which would make sense. This shows an
     unbelieveable amount of mettle. I applaud them. Hats off.

Dries, J. Francis III, The Married Man's Guide to Computing, RCNJ Academic Computing
     Press, 1994

Gibson, William, Neuromancer, Ace Science Fiction, 1984
     This is where we got Cyberpunk. Gibson is visionary. After reading it you'll see how
     technology expanded to fill the void he created with this book.

Huston, Geoff, ANU News V6.0, Australian Academic and Research Network, Canberra Au.,
     1990

Keyhoe, Brendan P., Zen and the Art of Internet, cs.widener.edu, 1992
     The seminal in-house Internet guide. Kehoe was something like 19 when he wrote Zen
     and the Art of Internet which has been so widely distributed and read as to make him
     an overnight celebrity. He was severely injured in an automobile accident on New
     Years day 1994.

Krol, Ed, The Whole Internet, OReilly & Associates, Sebastopol, Ca. 1992

Raymond, Eric, ed., The New Hacker's Dictionary, MIT Press, Cambridge Mass, 1992

Stoll, Cliff, The Cuckoo's Egg, Doubleday, New York, 1989
     Cliff Stoll is great. He's not a geek, but he is a geek if you know what I mean. He's
     hysterically funny and this book is great for anybody, no matter how much you know
     about computers or how little. Buy it for your mom and dad, buy it for yourself. The
     Cuckoo's Egg is a spy story. It's fascinating and just reading it you'll find that you're
     beginning to understand more about the Internet just by osmosis.
                              INDEX

Account . . . . . . . . .3-5, 7, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26, 34, 42, 59
Accounts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32, 52, 69
America On Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .7, 20-22, 26
     Sending mail to. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
ANU NEWS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8, 9
     Creating signature files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
ARCHIE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62-66
     commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
     e-mail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .65
     prog command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .64
     sites. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63
Archie.au . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .63
attribution marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
Compression programs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
Ccompuserve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21, 22
EVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21, 45
     commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47
     printing from EVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50
     setting the mail editor to EVE . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
     starting EVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .46
FDA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
FINGER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4, 28-30, 44, 56, 81
FTP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32, 33
     ascii files. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
     binary files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38
     Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
     directories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
     get command. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37
     hash marks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35
     mget . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
     text files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39
Geographic Name Server. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
Internet. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1, 3, 4, 8
     accessing from home. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61
     accessing libraries through. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
     account. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
     and snail mail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
     and VMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
     AOL and Compuserve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
     communication with other users . . . . . . . . . . . . .28
     cost . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
     e-mail address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
     etiquitte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
     getting files from . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67
     guides . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44, 69, 70, 74, 83, 84
     Lack of standards on . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
     names of computers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
     physical existence of. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
     Use on campus. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
     where to access. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
IRC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51
     commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54
     nearest server . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51
     sample session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51
KERMIT. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67, 68
Line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
Logging Out
     and ghost processes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .81
     of a SPAWNed session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
     of the local prompt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61
     Saturn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5, 6
MAIL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3, 4, 20-23, 25
     deleting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
     distribution lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
     distribution lists (sending to). . . . . . . . . . . . .23
     extracting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
     folders. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .23, 24
     folders (creating) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
     folders (deleting) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
     folders (viewing). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
     forward. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
     forwarding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
     internet address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
     MX mail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
     personal name. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
     reading. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
     reply. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
     security . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
     sending. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
     setting the editor to EVE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
MENU. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
     FTP. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
     in USENET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
     MAIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .20
     USENET News. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
     SATURN menu won't work over modem. . . . . . . . . . . .62
MUD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6, 44, 71, 73
     typing conventions on. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
MX Mail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22
NEWS
     Closing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
     Deregistering Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
     Directory Commands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
     Forwarding Messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
     Hierarchies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
     Posting Articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
     posting etiquitte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18
     Reading News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
     Registering Newsgroups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
     Replying to News Messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
     Saving Messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
     Search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
     Skipping Messages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12
Password. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
PENpages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .44
PGP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
Phone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
Plan file . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
Project file. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .29
QVT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61, 67, 68
     downloading with . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67
register dump
     VMS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
SATURN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
     calling in from home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .61
Show users DCL command. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
sig files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
SPAWN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40, 58
talk. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28-30
     eitquitte. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
TELNET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42, 63
     escape character . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .43
     uses for . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
Terminal
     terminals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Terminal (see also VT-220
     emulator (see also QVT). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80
Terminal (see also VT-220). . . . . . . . 1, 4-7, 9, 42, 61, 75
     emulator (see also QVT). . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67, 75
     eumlation (see also QVT) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62
Terminals (see also VT-220) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .42
USENET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
VAX . . . . . . . . . . . . .1, 3-5, 17, 20, 22, 45, 67, 77, 79
     definition of. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .79
     terminals. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
     VAX DOCUMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83
VMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, 5, 6, 17, 22, 56, 75, 77, 79
     copying files. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .60
     DCL. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76
     delete command . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
     directories. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17, 39, 58-60
     entering commands from EVE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .47
     EVE (see also separate entry for EVE). . . . . . . . . .45
     filenames. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13, 56, 57
     finding help with. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
     on-line help . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56
     phone utility. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
     register dump. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .77
     search . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14, 77
     spawn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .58
     vmsnet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17
     wildcards (see separate entry for Wildcards) . . . . . .57
VT-220. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2, 3, 67
Wildcards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .39, 57
     *.*. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40
Yanoff List of Special Connections. . . . . . . . . . . . . .44