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

archie.au] archie.au-amiga-readmes Free

011: [ archie.au] archie.au-ls-lRt Free

012: [ archie.au] archie.au-mac-readmes Free

013: [ archie.au] archie.au-pc-readmes Free

014: [ pc2.pc.maricopa.edu] ascd-education Free

015: [ archie.au] au-directory-of-servers Free

016: [ cirm2.univ-mrs.fr] bib-cirm Free

017: [ cmns-sun.think.com] bible Free

018: [ zenon.inria.fr] bibs-zenon-inria-fr Free

Keywords:

selects, w for keywords, arrows move, searches, q quits, or ?

Each line represents a different database (the .au at the end of some of

them means they are in Australia; the .fr on the last line represents a

database in France). And this is just the first page! If you type a

capital K, you’ll go to the next page (there are several pages).

Hitting a capital J will move you back a page.

The first thing you want to do is tell the WAIS program which

databases you want searched. To select a database, move the cursor bar

over the line you want (using your down and up arrow keys) and hit your

space bar. An asterisk will appear next to the line number. Repeat this

until you’ve selected all of the databases you want searched. Then hit

your W key, after which you’ll be prompted for the key words you’re

looking for. You can type in an entire line of these words — separate

each with a space, not a comma.

Hit return, and the search begins.

Let’s say you’re utterly fascinated with wheat. So you might select

agricultural-market-news to find its current world price. But you also

want to see if it has any religious implications, so you choose the

Bible and the Book of Mormon. What do you do with the stuff? Select

recipes and usenet-cookbook. Are there any recent Supreme Court

decisions involving the plant? Choose supreme-court. How about synonyms?

Try roget-thesaurus and just plain thesaurus.

Now hit w and type in wheat. Hit enter, and the WAIS program begins

its search. As it looks, it tells you whether any of the databases are

offline, and if so, when they might be ready for a search. In about a

minute, the program tells you how many hits it’s found. Then you get a new

menu, that looks something like this:

Keywords:

Score SourceTitleLines

001: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19

002: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. — N. choice, option; 36

003: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19

004: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. — N. choice, option; 36

005: [1000] (recipes) aem@mthvax Re: MONTHLY: Rec.Food.Recipes 425

006: [1000] ( Book-of-Mormon) Mosiah 9:96

007: [1000] ( Book-of-Mormon) 3 Nephi 18:185

008: [1000] (agricultural-ma) Re: JO GR115, WEEKLY GRAIN82

009: [ 822] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB351 PROSPECTIVE PLANTINGS 552

010: [ 800] ( recipes) kms@apss.a Re: REQUEST: Wheat-free, Suga 35

011: [ 750] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB101 CROP PRODUCTION258

012: [ 643] (agricultural-ma) Re: SJ GR850 DAILY NAT GRN SUM72

013: [ 400] ( recipes) pat@jaamer Re: VEGAN: Honey Granola63

014: [ 400] ( recipes) jrtrint@pa Re: OVO-LACTO: Sourdough/Trit 142

Each of these represents an article or citing that contains the word wheat,

or some related word. Move the cursor bar (with the down and up arrow

keys) to the one you want to see, hit enter, and it will begin to appear

on your screen. The “score” is a WAIS attempt to gauge how closely the

citing matches your request. Doesn’t look like the Supreme Court has had

anything to say about the plant of late!

Now think of how much time you would have spent logging onto various

databases just to find these relatively trivial examples.

8.6 THE WORLD-WIDE WEB

Developed by researchers at the European Particle Physics

Laboratory in Geneva, the World-Wide Web is somewhat similar to a WAIS.

But it’s designed on a system known as hypertext. Words in one document

are “linked” to other documents. It’s sort of like sitting with an

encyclopedia — you’re reading an article, see a reference that

intrigues you and so flip the pages to look up that reference.

To try the Worldwide Web, telnet to

ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu

Log on as: www. When you connect, you’ll see something like:

Welcome to CERN

The World-Wide Web: CERN entry point

CERN is the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

Select by number information here, or elsewhere.

Help1 About this program

World-Wide Web2 About the W3 global information initiative.

CERN information3 Information from and about this site

Particle Physics4 Other HEP sites with information servers

Other Subjects5 Catalogue of all online information by subject. Also:

by server type6 .

CHECK OUT X11 BROWSER “ViolaWWW”: ANON FTP TO info.cern.ch in

/pub/www/src *** Still beta, so keep bug reports calm :-)

If you use this service frequently, please install this or any W3 browser on

your own machine (see instructions7 ). You can configure it to start

1-7, for more, Quit, or Help:

You navigate the web by typing the number next to a given

reference. So if you want to know more about the web, hit 2. This is

another system that bears playing with.

8.7. CLIENTS, OR HOW TO SNARE MORE ON THE WEB

If you are used to plain-vanilla Unix or MS-DOS, then the way these

gophers and WAISs work seems quite straightforward. But if you’re used

to a computer with a graphical interface, such as a Macintosh, an IBM

compatible with Windows or a Next, you’ll probably regard their

interfaces as somewhat primitive. And even to a veteran MS-DOS user, the

World-Wide Web interface is rather clunky (and some of the documents and

files on the Web now use special formatting that would confuse your poor

computer).

There are, however, ways to integrate these services into your

graphical user interface. In fact, there are now ways to tie into the

Internet directly, rather than relying on whatever interface your

public-access system uses, through what are known as “client” programs.

These programs provide graphical interfaces for everything from ftp to

the World-Wide Web.

There is now a growing number of these “client” programs for

everything from ftp to gopher. PSI of Reston, Va., which offers

nationwide Internet access, in fact, requires its customers to use these

programs. Using protocols known as SLIP and PPP, these programs

communicate with the Net using the same basic data packets as much larger

computers online.

Beyond integration with your own computer’s “desktop,’’ client

programs let you do more than one thing at once on the net — while you’re

downloading a large file in one