THE INTERNET is reputedly the coolest place on the planet. It鈥檚 even reputed to be useful. You鈥檝e read about the Net. You鈥檝e watched TV programmes about it. You hear about some of the best parties in Real LifeTM on the Net. It鈥檚 even reputed to be useful. You don鈥檛 have 拢2000 for decent hardware rattling around in your piggy bank, so you ve never been 鈥渢here鈥�. But come September you are finally going to get your hands on it at college. Where do you begin?
First, a little clarification of what the Internet is. TV programmes hungry for visuals are likely to convey the impression that it鈥檚 a multimedia publishing project, with online fashion shows and 鈥� oh, yes 鈥� virtual sex. It isn鈥檛. The multimedia publishing you see is the World Wide Web.
The Internet is a means of transport for information. What you actually use are services which employ the Internet to transport data.
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The simplest service is electronic mail or e-mail. When you have written a message on a computer, why print it onto slices of dead tree when you can send the real thing 鈥� the computer text file 鈥� to one or a hundred recipients at virtually no cost? The developers 鈥� academics and computer types given to working in time zones far removed from their physical location 鈥� quickly found this an ideal means of communication. Messages wait in 鈥渕ailboxes鈥� until their recipients are ready for them.
You may get an e-mail address automatically, or you may have to apply to your computer centre. As soon as you can tell people you are A.Murshid3@redbrick.ac.uk, you are on the Net 鈥� and with a relatively prestigious academic address. The best way to discover other people鈥檚 e-mail addresses is to look around the services described below 鈥� or telephone. If you e-mail someone you don鈥檛 know, be brief, say who you are, and don鈥檛 be hurt if the top experts in your subject don鈥檛 reply. Some academics get hundreds of messages a day.
Just as you can send a computer file to a private mailbox, so you can send it to a public 鈥減lace鈥� known as a newsgroup, where others can read it and 鈥減ost鈥� comments of their own. Usenet is a set of several thousand such forums for debate, information, trivia, gossip and blazing rows, distributed across BitNet, the Internet and further afield.
Messages needn鈥檛 be text. Some under-graduates think it witty to scan in smutty pictures and post the files to Usenet. Most British universities exclude these 鈥� not least because of the prodigious disc space that images of this kind occupy. (One side effect is to give the sadder nerds an incentive to explore the more exotic ways of retrieving files). Several hundred groups contain some serious academic discussion.
Another early extension of e-mail was the mailing list. When you send an e-mail message to the robot which manages a list, it redistributes it to all the other subscribers. Though technologically primitive, the subscription lists often have a much higher level of discussion. You subscribe to the open lists by sending a message to the robot鈥檚 own address (owner-foo@bar.edu, for example, or majordomo@bar.edu rather than the address on the list foo@bar.edu). Get used to irrational coinages like 鈥渇oo@bar鈥� for an arbitrary name. Don鈥檛 ask publicly for their origins unless you want to tell the world 鈥淚鈥檓 new here, ridicule me!鈥�. Look them up instead.
When reading either Usenet groups or mailing lists, keep reading for at least a fortnight before you post. Any burning question that springs to mind straight away will almost certainly have cropped up before in hundreds of other minds. So hunt down the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list for that particular topic and you may well find the answer there.
Don鈥檛 broadcast requests; stick to one newsgroup or list at a time to start with. If you post an irrelevant message to a hundred newsgroups you may find 8-megabyte garbage files arriving in your mailbox once a second, on the dot, for a week. Your system administrator may have a reasonable defence for GBH.
You ought, when you first get a mailbox, to be shown a small book鈥檚 worth of advice for new users. Just for once, print it out. Then stay away from all electrical equipment until you have read it. All.
Be aware that the groups and lists are deluged every September groups and lists are deluged with misconceptions by new students. Be cool, and don鈥檛 let on you鈥檙e a newbie till you鈥檙e not.
The traditional way to retrieve a FAQ list, missing newuser message or other archived file is by File Transfer Protocol (FTP). This connects you to a machine elsewhere and lets you wander around its directory structure. To do this you will probably have to use the notoriously counter-intuitive commands of the Unix operating system. Best practise the commands locally first.
If you hunt around, you will find scads of doctoral theses and prepublication copies of research papers in certain fields 鈥� molecular biology, high-energy physics, and most parts of computing and cognitive studies in particular. Since no one is quite clear about how you cite an article wbich exists only on the Net, it鈥檚 a good idea to get to know your tutors before quoting 鈥淧rofessor Famous, personal communication鈥�.
There must, logically, be an essay-bank out there somewhere to help you catch up, but to ask for its location could invite retribution. I can say that a Veronica search on the word 鈥渆ssay鈥� produces 1226 items 鈥� many of which seem to be first-year essays from the University of Missouri and thus too basic for your needs. Sorry.
Knowing what is available by FTP was largely a hit-and-miss affair until Net cataloguing services came along. The earliest was the archiver known as Archie, which assumes you are looking for program code. Next came Gopher, and its sidekick Veronica, the Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives (or possibly a programmer鈥檚 daughter鈥檚 name). Gopher 鈥済oes for鈥� resources by asking computers every night 鈥淲hat鈥檚 new?鈥�, and Veronica searches the resulting mountain of data by keyword.
Housekeeping is not the typical Net inhabitant鈥檚 strong point. A lot of stuff faithfully catalogued by Gopher has vanished. In fact, reliability of any kind is not the Net鈥檚 thing. If something doesn鈥檛 work, try looking later and elsewhere.
Next came the World Wide Web (WWW), the only brief description of which is 鈥渄ocuments referencing each other in a web of arbitrary dimensionality鈥�. This emphasises its key characteristic, which is that it lets you jump out of one document on the Net and into another (which may be somewhere else on the Net entirely) simply by pointing to a highlighted word. It also neatly illustrates the impossibility of describing WWW properly in one-dimensional text. Potentially, WWW links every electronic document in existence from Shakespeare to Ren and Stimpy into one hypermedium. Fortunately it鈥檚 much easier to experience than to define.
To access WWW you need a 鈥渃lient program鈥�. A mouse-driven one such as Netscape will give you pretty pictures (as shown on TV) if your computer or terminal will run it. The text-only Lynx, which usually runs on someone else鈥檚 much faster machine, is actually more powerful if it鈥檚 words you are after.
The next really hot thing is likely to be the MOO. Its origins are convoluted so take a deep breath. First there was the University of Essex Multi-User Dungeon, where archetypical nerds with deviant sleep cycles played a simulation of the role-playing fantasy Dungeons and Dragons, in the form of a 24-hour international typed conversation and elf-baiting contest. Then that was extended at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in California to the 鈥淢UD, Object-Oriented鈥� (MOO), in which players can define objects, from the traditional bag of spells to semiautonomous robot players. Now the MOO is going respectable, as a medium for business conferencing and virtual tutorials.
Be warned. All these services are potentially addictive. If susceptible, you may lose contact with RL (Real Life) and miss essay deadlines by the bucketful. (Take it from one who knows: I just spent 12 hours 鈥渞esearching鈥� MOOs instead of writing this.) You may find it annoying if your college rations your Net access, but they are doing you a favour. Remember: three dimensions good, other numbers merely virtual.
TO GET lists of archived FAQ publicly accessible mailing lists, and so on, enter ftpsrc.doc.ic.ac.uk, log in as 鈥渁nonymous鈥�, changing directory to /pub/usenet. The main site is rtfm.mit.edu, but it鈥檚 constantly overloaded. Every university site should have its own Gopher server. Just enter the command 鈥済opher鈥� and follow the menus to various Veronicas.
For a one-stop list of tools that catalogue WWW, use the Goto command to leap to the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or address) 鈥�. Both FTP and gopher/veronica are available through WWW, but the old way is often considerably faster. To try the original MOO, use the command telnet lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888, enter 鈥渃onnect guest鈥� and then 鈥渉elp manners鈥� and 鈥淍tutorial鈥� 鈥� and read the lot. It鈥檚 painfully slow whenever Americans are awake. The serious applications are mostly in other MOOs.
On paper The Internet Made Simple by Peter McBride (Made Simple Books, pp 149, 拢7.99 pbk) is admirably brief. The Whole Internet by Ed Krol (second edition, O鈥橰eilly, pp 450, 拢18.50 pbk) is still excellent. But the Net changed before the ink was dry. If you want to be ahead of the game, you use the Net to discover the Net.