Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet Part 20

Libros El sano arte de leer.....

Sistemas Sistemas Operativos en General.

Virus Su peor enemigo......

Cultural Es.p.a.cio 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 doc.u.ments, from copies of U.S. and Ohio Supreme Court decisions to the Magna Carta and the U.S. Const.i.tution. 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 a.s.sociation, 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 inst.i.tutions have come up with creative uses for these .plan files, letting you do everything from checking the weather in Ma.s.sachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings. Try fingering these e-mail addresses:

[email protected] Latest National Weather Service weather forecasts for regions in Ma.s.sachusetts.

[email protected] Locations and magnitudes of recent earthquakes around the world.

[email protected] Current major-league baseball standings and results of the previous day's games.

[email protected] The day's events at NASA.

[email protected] 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

[email protected]