Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet Part 4

1.6 HOW IT WORKS

The worldwide Net is actually a complex web of smaller regional networks. To understand it, picture a modern road network of trans- continental superhighways connecting large cities. From these large cities come smaller freeways and parkways to link together small towns, whose residents travel on slower, narrow residential ways.

The Net superhighway is the high-speed Internet. Connected to this are computers that use a particular system of transferring data at high speeds. In the U.S., the major Internet "backbone"

theoretically can move data at rates of 45 million bits per second (compare this to the average home modem, which has a top speed of roughly 9,600 to 14,400 bits per second).

Connected to the backbone computers are smaller networks serving particular geographic regions, which generally move data at speeds around 1.5 million bits per second.

Feeding off these in turn are even smaller networks or individual computers.

Unlike with commercial networks such as CompuServe or Prodigy, there is no one central computer or computers running the Internet -- its resources are to be found among thousands of individual computers. This is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. The approach means it is virtually impossible for the entire Net to crash at once -- even if one computer shuts down, the rest of the network stays up. The design also reduces the costs for an individual or organization to get onto the network. But thousands of connected computers can also make it difficult to navigate the Net and find what you want -- especially as different computers may have different commands for plumbing their resources. It is only recently that Net users have begun to develop the sorts of navigational tools and "maps" that will let neophytes get around without getting lost.

n.o.body really knows how many computers and networks actually make up this Net. Some estimates say there are now as many as 5,000 networks connecting nearly 2 million computers and more than 15 million people around the world. Whatever the actual numbers, however, it is clear they are only increasing.

The Net is more than just a technological marvel. It is human communication at its most fundamental level. The pace may be a little quicker when the messages race around the world in a few seconds, but it's not much different from a large and interesting party. You'll see things in cybers.p.a.ce that will make you laugh; you'll see things that will anger you. You'll read silly little snippets and new ideas that make you think. You'll make new friends and meet people you wish would just go away.

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.

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; it takes asking and answering questions, exchanging opinions -- getting involved.

If you choose to go forward, to use and contribute, you will become a citizen of Cybers.p.a.ce. If you're reading these words for the first time, this may seem like an amusing but unlikely notion -- that one could "inhabit" a place without physical s.p.a.ce. But put a mark beside these words. Join the Net and actively partic.i.p.ate for a year. Then re-read this pa.s.sage. It will no longer seem so strange to be a "citizen of Cybers.p.a.ce." It will seem like the most natural thing in the world.

And that leads to another fundamental thing to remember:

You can't break the Net!

As you travel the Net, your computer may freeze, your screen may erupt into a ma.s.s of gibberish. You may think you've just disabled a million-dollar computer somewhere -- or even your own personal computer. Sooner or later, this feeling happens to everyone -- and likely more than once. But the Net and your computer are hardier than you think, so relax. You can no more break the Net than you can the phone system. If something goes wrong, try again. If nothing at all happens, you can always disconnect. If worse comes to worse, you can turn off your computer. Then take a deep breath. And dial right back in. Leave a note for the person who runs the computer to which you've connected to ask for advice. Try it again. Persistence pays.

Stay and contribute. The Net will be richer for it -- and so will you.

1.7 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

* Your computer connects with a public-access site and get gibberish on your screen.

If you are using parameters of 8-1-N, try 7-1-e (or vice-versa). If that doesn't work, try another modem speed.

* You have your computer dial a public-access site, but nothing happens.

Check the phone number you typed in. If correct, turn on your modem's speaker (on Hayes-compatible modems, you can usually do this by typing ATM1 in your communications software's "terminal mode"). If the phone just rings and rings, the public-access site could be down for maintenance or due to a crash or some other problem. If you get a "connect" message, but nothing else, try hitting enter or escape a couple of times.

* You try to log in, but after you type your pa.s.sword, nothing happens, or you get a "timed out" message followed by a disconnect.

Re-dial the number and try it again.

* Always remember, if you have a problem that just doesn't go away, ask! Ask your system administrator, ask a friend, but ask. Somebody will know what to do.

1.8 FYI

The Net grows so fast that even the best guide to its resources would be somewhat outdated the day it was printed. At the end of each chapter, however, you'll find FYI pointers to places on the Net where you can go for more information or to keep updated on new resources and services.

Peter Kaminski maintains a list of systems that provide public access to Internet services. It's availble on the network itself, which obviously does you little good if you currently have no access, but which can prove invaluable should you move or want to find a new system. Look for his "PDIAL" file in the alt.bbs.lists or news.answers newsgroups in Usenet (for information on accessing Usenet, see Chapter 3).

Steven Levy's book, "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,"

(Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). describes the early culture and ethos that ultimately resulted in the Internet and Usenet.

John Quarterman's "The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide" (Digital Press, 1990) is an exhaustive look at computer networks and how they connect with each other.

You'll find numerous doc.u.ments about the Internet, its history and its resources in the pub/Net_info directory on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FTP server (see chapter 7 to decipher this).

Chapter 2: E-MAIL

2.1 THE BASICS

Electronic mail, or e-mail, is your personal connection to the world of the Net.

All of the millions of people around the world who use the Net have their own e-mail addresses. A growing number of "gateways" tie more and more people to the Net every day. When you logged onto the host system you are now using, it automatically generated an address for you, as well.

The basic concepts behind e-mail parallel those of regular mail.

You send mail to people at their particular addresses. In turn, they write to you at your e-mail address. You can subscribe to the electronic equivalent of magazines and newspapers. You might even get electronic junk mail.

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. You send your message when it's convenient for you. Your recipients respond at their convenience. No more telephone tag. And while a phone call across the country or around the world can quickly result in huge phone bills, e-mail lets you exchange vast amounts of mail for only a few pennies -- even if the other person is in New Zealand.

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.

The quickest way to start learning e-mail is to send yourself a message. Most public-access sites actually have several different types of mail systems, all of which let you both send and receive mail. We'll start with the simplest one, known, appropriately enough, as "mail," and then look at a couple of other interfaces. At your host system's command prompt, type:

mail username

where username is the name you gave yourself when you first logged on.

Hit enter. The computer might respond with

subject:

Type

test

or, actually, anything at all (but you'll have to hit enter before you get to the end of the screen). Hit enter.

The cursor will drop down a line. You can now begin writing the actual message. Type a sentence, again, anything at all. And here's where you hit your first Unix frustration, one that will bug you repeatedly: you have to hit enter before you get to the very end of the line. Just like typewriters, many Unix programs have no word-wrapping (although there are ways to get some Unix text processors, such as emacs, to word-wrap).

When done with your message, hit return. Now hit control-D (the control and the D keys at the same time). This is a Unix command that tells the computer you're done writing and that it should close your "envelope" and mail it off (you could also hit enter once and then, on a blank line, type a period at the beginning of the line and hit enter again).

You've just sent your first e-mail message. And because you're sending mail to yourself, rather than to someone somewhere else on the Net, your message has already arrived, as we'll see in a moment.

If you had wanted, you could have even written your message on your own computer and then uploaded it into this electronic "envelope." There are a couple of good reasons to do this with long or involved messages. 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 doc.u.ment in ASCII or text format. Uploading a doc.u.ment 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. Or you can copy and paste the text, if your software allows that. When done, hit control-D as above.

Now you have mail waiting for you. Normally, when you log on, your public-access site will tell you whether you have new mail waiting. To open your mailbox and see your waiting mail, type

mail

and hit enter.

When the host system sees "mail" without a name after it, it knows you want to look in your mailbox rather than send a message.

Your screen, on a plain-vanilla Unix system will display:

Mail version SMI 4.0 Mon Apr 24 18:34:15 PDT 1989 Type ? for help.

"/usr/spool/mail/adamg": 1 message 1 new 1 unread

>N 1 adamg Sat Jan 15 20:04 12/290 test