Electronic Frontier Foundation

“ A standard known as MIME lets one send audio and graphics files in a message. Imagine opening your e-mail one day to hear your granddaughter's first words, or a "photo" of your friend's new house. Eventually, this standard could allow for distribution of even small video displays over the Net. All of this will require vast new amounts of Net power, to handle both the millions of new people who will jump onto the Net and the new applications they want. Replicating a moving image on a computer screen alone takes a phenomenal amount of computer bits, and computing power to arrange them. ”

“ You can browse through the holdings of your local library — or of libraries halfway around the world — do your banking and see if your neighbor has gone bankrupt, all through a computer and modem. Imploding costs coupled with exploding power are bringing ever more powerful computer and digital systems to ever growing numbers of people. The Net, with its rapidly expanding collection of databases and other information sources, is no longer limited to the industrialized nations of the West; today the web extends from Siberia to Zimbabwe. ”

“ E-mail is your connection to help — your Net lifeline. The Net can sometimes seem a frustrating place! No matter how hard you try, no matter where you look, you just might not be able to find the answer to whatever is causing you problems. But when you know how to use e-mail, help is often just a few keystrokes away: you can ask your system administrator or a friend for help in an e-mail message. ”

“ In fact, the Net actually has a rich tradition of helping out visitors and newcomers. Until very recently, there were few written guides for ordinary people, and the Net grew largely through an "oral" tradition in which the old- timers helped the newcomers. So when you connect, don't be afraid to ask for help. You'll be surprised at how many people will lend a hand! Without such folks, in fact, this guide would not be possible. My thanks to all the people who have written with suggestion, additions and corrections since the Big Dummy's Guide first appeared on the Internet in 1993. ”

“ E-mail has two distinct advantages over regular mail. The most obvious is speed. Instead of several days, your message can reach the other side of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on where you drop off your mail and the state of the connections between there and your recipient) . The other advantage is that once you master the basics, you'll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file libraries. You'll see how to do this later, along with learning how to transfer program and data files through e-mail. E-mail also has advantages over the telephone. ”

“ We live in an age of communication, yet the various media we use to talk to one another remain largely separate systems. One day, however, your telephone, TV, fax machine and personal computer will be replaced by a single ``information processor'' linked to the worldwide Net by strands of optical fiber. Beyond databases and file libraries, power will be at your fingertips. Linked to thousands, even millions of like-minded people, you'll be able to participate in social and political movements across the country and around the world. ”

“ Major network providers continue to work on ways to make it easier for users of one network to communicate with those of another. Work is underway on a system for providing a universal "white pages" in which you could look up somebody's electronic-mail address, for example. This connectivity trend will likely speed up in coming years as users begin to demand seamless network access, much as telephone users can now dial almost anywhere in the world without worrying about how many phone companies actually have to connect their calls. ”

“ Wide-area information servers promise another way to zero in on information hidden on the Net. In a WAIS, the user sees only one interface — the program worries about how to access information on dozens, even hundreds, of different databases. You tell give a WAIS a word and it scours the net looking for places where it's mentioned. You get a menu of documents, each ranked according to how relevant to your search the WAIS thinks it is. Like gophers, WAIS "client" programs can already be found on many public-access Internet sites. ”

“ USENET II 4.1 FLAME, BLATHER AND SPEW Something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. Perhaps it's the immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. Whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon think seem to exist to make you miserable. Rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's just so easy to hit your R key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them. ”

“ WHEN THINGS GO WRONG As the Internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under more of a strain. If you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at least on the East Coast of the U.S., you'll sometimes notice that it takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come up. Sometimes, you'll even get a message that there are too many people connected to whichever service you're trying to use and so you can't get in. ”

“ 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 window, you can be chatting with a friend through an Internet chat program in another. Unfortunately, using a client program can cost a lot of money. Some require you to be connected directly to the Internet through an Ethernet network for example. Others work through modem protocols, such as SLIP, but public-access sites that allow such access may charge anywhere from $25 to $200 a month extra for the service. ”

“ And today, the links grow ever closer between the Internet and such commercial networks as CompuServe and Prodigy, whose users can now exchange electronic mail with their Internet friends. Some commercial providers, such as Delphi and America Online, are working to bring their subscribers direct access to Internet services. And as it becomes easier to use, more and more people will join this worldwide community we call the Net. Being connected to the Net takes more than just reading conferences and logging messages to your computer ”

“ If you think you might be using the Net to transfer large numbers of files, a faster modem is always worth the price. It will dramatically reduce the amount of time your modem or computer is tied up transferring files and, if you are paying for Net access by the hour, will save you quite a bit in online charges. Like the computer to which it attaches, a modem is useless without software to tell it how to work. Most modems today come with easy-to-install software. Try the program out. ”

“ Some enterprising hobbyists and companies unwilling to pay the high costs of Internet access (or unable to meet stringent government regulations for access) learned how to link their own systems to the Internet, even if "only" for e-mail and conferences. Some of these systems began offering access to the public. Now anybody with a computer and modem — and persistence — could tap into the world. In the 1990s, the Net continues to grow at exponential rates. Some estimates are that the volume of messages transferred through the Net grows 20 percent a month. ”

“ GOPHERS Even with tools like Hytelnet and archie, telnet and ftp can still be frustrating. There are all those telnet and ftp addresses to remember. Telnet services often have their own unique commands. And, oh, those weird directory and file names! But now that the Net has become a rich repository of information, people are developing ways to make it far easier to find and retrieve information and files. Gophers and Wide-Area Information Servers (WAISs) are two services that could ultimately make the Internet as easy to navigate as commercial networks such as CompuServe or Prodigy. ”

“ The reason there is more than one is because the Internet has become so popular that only one veronica (or one gopher or one of almost anything) would quickly be overwhelmed by all the information requests from around the world. You can use veronica to search for almost anything. Want to find museums that might have online displays from their exhibits? Try searching for "museum." Looking for a copy of the Declaration of Independence? Try "declaration." In many cases, your search will bring up a new gopher menu of choices to try. ”

“ Large organizations often have more than one computer linked to the Internet; in this case, the name of the particular machine is world (you will quickly notice that, like boat owners, Internet computer owners always name their machines) . Domains tell you the name of the organization that runs a given e-mail site and what kind of site it is or, if it's not in the U.S., what country it's located in. Large organizations may have more than one computer or gateway tied to the Internet, so you'll often see a two-part domain name ”

“ Still, commercial activity on the remains far below that found on other networks, such as CompuServe, with its Electronic Mall, or Prodigy, with its advertisements on almost every screen. In part that's because of the newness and complexity of the Internet as a commercial medium. In part, however, that is because of security concerns. Companies worry about such issues as crackers getting into their system over the network, and many people do not like the idea of sending a credit-card number via the Internet (an e-mail message could be routed through several sites to get to its destination) . ”

“ The world is just a phone call away. With a computer and modem, you'll be able to connect to the Internet, the world's largest computer network (and if you're lucky, you won't even need the modem; many colleges and companies now give their students or employees direct access to the Internet) . ”

“ Mail programs and text editors such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity. Some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the Internet just by clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor, sort of the way one can now navigate a Macintosh computer — or a commercial online service such as Prodigy. Then there are the Internet services themselves. ”

“ One thing to keep in mind is that a file is not necessarily the same as a program — it could also be a document. This means you can use archie to search for, say, everything online related to the Beetles, as well as computer programs and graphics files. A number of Net sites now have their own archie programs that take your request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie database — ask your system administrator if she has it online. These "client" programs seem to provide information a lot more quickly than the actual archie itself! ”

“ Telnet is a program that lets you use the power of the Internet to connect you to databases, library catalogs, and other information resources around the world. Want to see what the weather's like in Vermont? Check on crop conditions in Azerbaijan? Get more information about somebody whose name you've seen online? Telnet lets you do this, and more. Alas, there's a big "but!'' Unlike the phone system, Internet is not yet universal; not everybody can use all of its services. Almost all colleges and universities on the Internet provide telnet access. ”

“ The first letter on each line is the letter you type to read that particular "article" (it makes sense that a "newsgroup" would have "articles") . Next comes the name of the person who wrote that article, followed by its length, in lines, and what the article is about. At the bottom, you see the local time at your access site, what you're doing right now (i.e., SELECTing articles) , which key to hit for some help (the ? key) and how many of the articles in the newsgroup you can see on this screen. ”

“ Contrast this with the telephone, which now also provides access to large amounts of information through push buttons, or a computer network such as Prodigy, which one navigates through simple commands and mouse clicks. Internet system administrators have begun to realize that not all people want to learn the intricacies of Unix, and that that fact does not make them bad people. We are already seeing the development of simple interfaces that will put the Net's power to use by millions of people. ”

“ If you are in nn, hitting a capital Y will bring up a similar list. Typing "nn newsgroup" for every newsgroup can get awfully tiring after awhile. When you use nn, your host system looks in a file called .newsrc. This is basically a list of every newsgroup on the host system along with notations on which groups and articles you have read (all maintained by the computer) . You can also use this file to create a "reading list" that brings up each newsgroup to which you want to "subscribe." ”

“ As more companies realize the potential profits to be made in the new information infrastructure, what happens to such systems as Usenet, possibly the world's first successful anarchistic system, where everybody can say whatever they want? ”

“ Every so often, a discussion gets so out of hand that somebody predicts that either the government will catch on and shut the whole thing down or somebody will sue to close down the network, or maybe even the wrath of God will smote everybody involved. ”

“ One is that once you hit enter at the end of a line in "mail" you can't readily fix any mistakes on that line (unless you use some special commands to call up a Unix text processor) . Also, if you are paying for access by the hour, uploading a prepared message can save you money. Remember to save the document in ASCII or text format. Uploading a document you've created in a word processor that uses special formatting commands (which these days means many programs) will cause strange effects. When you get that blank line after the subject line, upload the message using the ASCII protocol. ”

“ The Net moves data at phenomenal rates of speed. But that 500,000- byte file that gets transferred to your host system in a few seconds could take more than an hour or two to download to your computer if you're using a 2400-baud modem. Your host system may also have limits on the amount of bytes you can store online at any one time. Also, although it is really extremely unlikely you will ever get a file infected with a virus, if you plan to do much downloading over the Net, you'd be wise to invest in a good anti-viral program, just in case. ”

“ 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. ”