Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet - Electronic Frontier Foundation (reading rainbow books .txt) 📗

14:11:41 1992

Connection closed by foreign host.

The middle line tells you the date and exact Mountain Standard

Time, as determined by a federal atomic clock.

TRANSPORTATION

The Subway Navigator in Paris can help you learn how long it will

take to get from point A to point B on subway systems around the world.

Telnet: metro.jussieu.fr 10000

No log-in is needed.

When you connect, you’ll be asked to choose a language in which to

search (you can choose English or French) and then a city to search.

You’ll be asked for the station you plan to leave from and the station

you want to get to.

WEATHER

The University of Michigan’s Department of Atmospheric, Oceanographic

and Space Sciences supplies weather forecasts for U.S. and foreign cities,

along with skiing and hurricane reports.

Telnet: madlab.sprl.umich.edu 3000 (note the 3000).

No log-in name is needed.

Also see under Weather in the FTP list for information on downloading

satellite and radar weather images.

6.4 TELNET BULLETIN-BOARD SYSTEMS

You might think that Usenet, with its hundreds of newsgroups,

would be enough to satisfy the most dedicated of online communicators.

But there are a number of “bulletin-board” and other systems that

provide even more conferences or other services, many not found

directly on the Net. Some are free; others charge for access. They

include:

Bookstacks Unlimited is a Cleveland bookstore that uses the Internet

to advertise its services. Its online system features not only a catalog,

however, but conferences on books and literature.

Telnet: books.com

Log in with your own name and select a password for future connections.

Cimarron. Run by the Instituto Technical in Monterey, Mexico,

this system has Spanish conferences, but English commands, as you can

see from this menu of available conferences:

List of Boards

Name Title

General Board general

Dudas Dudas de Cimarron

Comentarios Comentarios al SYSOP

Musica Para los afinados….....

Libros El sano arte de leer…..

Sistemas Sistemas Operativos en General.

Virus Su peor enemigo…...

Cultural Espacio Cultural de Cimarron

NeXT El Mundo de NeXT

Ciencias Solo apto para Nerds.

Inspiracion Para los Romanticos e Inspirados.

Deportes Discusiones Deportivas

To be able to write messages and gain access to files, you have

to leave a note to SYSOP with your name, address, occupation and phone

number. To do this, at any prompt, hit your M key and then enter,

which will bring up the mail system. Hitting H brings up a list of

commands and how to use them.

Telnet: bugs.mty.itesm.mx (8 p.m. to 10 a.m., Eastern time, only).

At the “login:” prompt, type

bbs

and hit enter.

Cleveland Free-Net. The first of a series of Free-nets, this

represents an ambitious attempt to bring the Net to the public.

Originally an in-hospital help network, it is now sponsored by Case

Western Reserve University, the city of Cleveland, the state of Ohio

and IBM. It uses simple menus, similar to those found on CompuServe,

but organized like a city:

<<< CLEVELAND FREE-NET DIRECTORY >>>

1 The Administration Building

2 The Post Office

3 Public Square

4 The Courthouse & Government Center

5 The Arts Building

6 Science and Technology Center

7 The Medical Arts Building

8 The Schoolhouse (Academy One)

9 The Community Center & Recreation Area

10 The Business and Industrial Park

11 The Library

12 University Circle

13 The Teleport

14 The Communications Center

15 NPTN/USA TODAY HEADLINE NEWS

h=Help, x=Exit Free-Net, “go help”=extended help

Your Choice ==>

The system has a vast and growing collection of public documents,

from copies of U.S. and Ohio Supreme Court decisions to the Magna

Carta and the U.S. Constitution. It links residents to various

government agencies and has daily stories from USA Today. Beyond

Usenet (found in the Teleport area), it has a large collection of

local conferences on everything from pets to politics. And yes, it’s

free!

Telnet: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu or

freenet-in-b.cwru.edu or

freenet-in-c.cwru.edu

When you connect to Free-Net, you can look around the system.

However, if you want to be able to post messages in its conferences or

use e-mail, you will have to apply in writing for an account.

Information on this is available when you connect.

DUBBS. This is a bulletin-board system in Delft in the

Netherlands. The conferences and files are mostly in Dutch, but the

help files and the system commands themselves are in English.

Telnet: tudrwa.tudelft.nl

ISCA BBS. Run by the Iowa Student Computer Association, it has

more than 100 conferences, including several in foreign languages.

After you register, hit K for a list of available conferences and then

J to join a particular conference (you have to type in the name of the

conference, not the number next to it). Hitting H brings up

information about commands.

Telnet bbs.isca.uiowa.edu

At the “login:” prompt, type

bbs

and hit enter.

Youngstown Free-Net. The people who created Cleveland Free-Net

sell their software for $1 to anybody willing to set up a similar

system. A number of cities now have their own Free-Nets, including

Youngstown, Ohio. Telnet: yfn.ysu.edu At the “login:” prompt, type

visitor

and hit enter.

6.5 PUTTING THE FINGER ON SOMEONE

Finger is a handy little program which lets you find out more about

people on the Net — and lets you tell others on the Net more about

yourself.

Finger uses the same concept as telnet or ftp. But it works with

only one file, called .plan (yes, with a period in front). This is a

text file an Internet user creates with a text editor in his home

directory. You can put your phone number in there, tell a little bit

about yourself, or write almost anything at all.

To finger somebody else’s .plan file, type this at the command

line:

finger email-address

where email-address is the person’s e-mail address. You’ll get back a

display that shows the last time the person was online, whether

they’ve gotten any new mail since that time and what, if anything, is

in their .plan file.

Some people and institutions have come up with creative uses for

these .plan files, letting you do everything from checking the weather

in Massachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings. Try

fingering these e-mail addresses:

weather@cirrus.mit.edu Latest National Weather Service weather

forecasts for regions in Massachusetts.

quake@geophys.washington.edu Locations and magnitudes of recent

earthquakes around the world.

jtchern@ocf.berkeley.edu Current major-league baseball standings and

results of the previous day’s games.

nasanews@space.mit.edu The day’s events at NASA.

coke@cs.cmu.edu See how many cans of each type of soda

are left in a particular soda machine

in the computer-science department of

Carnegie-Mellon University.

6.6 FINDING SOMEONE ON THE NET

So you have a friend and you want to find out if he has an Internet

account to which you can write? The quickest way may be to just pick up

the phone, call him and ask him. Although there are a variety of “white

pages” services available on the Internet, they are far from complete —

college students, users of commercial services such as CompuServe and

many Internet public-access sites, and many others simply won’t be

listed. Major e-mail providers are working on a universal directory

system, but that could be some time away.

In the meantime, a couple of “white pages” services might give you

some leads, or even just entertain you as you look up famous people or

long-lost acquaintances.

The whois directory provides names, e-mail and postal mail address

and often phone numbers for people listed in it. To use it, telnet to

internic.net

No log-on is needed. The quickest way to use it is to type

whois name

at the prompt, where “name” is the last name or organization name you’re

looking for.

Another service worth trying, especially since it seems to give

beginners fewer problems, is the Knowbot Information Service reachable by

telnet at

info.cnri.reston.va.us 185

Again, no log-on is needed. This service actually searches through a

variety of other “white pages” systems, including the user directory for

MCIMail. To look for somebody, type

query name

where “name” is the last name of the person you’re looking for. You can

get details of other commands by hitting a question mark at the prompt.

You can also use the knowbot system by e-mail. Start a message to

netaddress@info.cnri.reston.va.us

You can leave the “subject:” line blank. As your message, type

query name

for the simplest type of search. If you want details on more complex

searches, add another line:

man

Another way to search is via the Usenet name server. This is a

system at MIT that keeps track of the e-mail addresses of everybody who

posts a Usenet message that appears at MIT. It works by e-mail. Send a

message to

mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu

Leave the “subject:” line blank. As your message, write

send usenet-addresses/lastname

where “lastname” is the last name of the person you’re looking for.

6.7 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

Nothing happens when you try to connect to a telnet site.

The site could be down for maintenance or problems.

You get a “host unavailable” message. The telnet site is down

for some reason.

Try again later.

You get a “host unknown” message.

Check your spelling of the site name.

You type in a password on a telnet site that requires one, and

you get a “login incorrect” message.

Try logging in again. If you get the message again, hit your

control and ] keys at the same time to disengage and return to your host

system.

You can’t seem to disconnect from a telnet site.

Use control-] to disengage and return to your host system.

6.8 FYI

The Usenet newsgroups alt.internet.services and alt.bbs.internet

can provide pointers to new telnet systems. Scott Yanoff