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telnet has been around almost as long as the Internet. By using telnet, you can connect 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. When you telnet to another computer, you’re going across the Internet and logging in to that machine. You won’t find graphics as you do on the Web; telnet is text only.
NOTE: gopher is another early Internet tool, and many telnet sites are most easily found through gopher menus. See the following section on gopher.
To start telnet from your browser, enter the URL of the telnet site you want to go to. For example,
telnet://pac.carl.org
will start a telnet program and will take you to the location you entered. From there, you’re out of the browser and have entered “menu land.”
• See “Using telnet to Access Remote Computers,” p. 578
| Configuring Netscape to Work with telnet
telnet probably isn’t built into your browser. You’ll need to get a telnet program, install it on your computer, and then configure the browser to use it. Here’s an example set of instructions for configuring telnet for Netscape:
Windows 95 and Windows NT include telnet applications in the Windows system folder. For Macs and older versions of Windows, NCSA Telnet is a popular choice. |
Most telnet sites are fairly easy to use and have online help systems. Most also work best—and, in some cases, only—with VT100 emulation. You may also find that many of the resources are now also available on the Web.
gopher is an Internet service that allows you to access information by making selections from a series of menus. gopher was one of the first Internet services that made a serious attempt at offering a user-friendly interface.
When you connect to a site that offers gopher services, you get a menu of available choices. Each menu is either a file or another menu. You can select your choice from the menu without having to know the name or IP address of the destination site or the directory and filenames of the particular information you’re asking for. gopher handles the details for you.
NOTE: No information resources on the Internet are actually “gopher-specific.” Anything you can get through gopher can be accessed by other means, such as an HTML Web page, FTP, or telnet. In some cases, sites may have chosen to make resources available only via gopher for security reasons.
To access a gopher server with a Web browser, change the protocol part of the URL so that it says gopher instead of http. For example, the URL for the gopher server at sunsite.unc.edu is
gopher provides an easy means to navigate the Internet. Unfortunately, the information that gopher can retrieve may not be well organized, so finding what you want can be a bit of an adventure. Because the items in Gopherspace are presented as a set of menus, you sometimes have to wade through many different menus to get to the file you’re searching for. This problem aside, however, a lot of good information is available through gopher.
One disadvantage of gopher is the lack of a standard subject list for the various gopher servers. The administrators for each gopher server have organized their information in their own manner. This means that each gopher server you access has different subjects. If gopher servers do happen to have some of the same subjects, chances are they aren’t named the same way.
TIP: Because Gopherspace has been around longer than the World Wide Web and is less organized, it’s too large to search randomly. veronica is like archie, except that it searches gopher servers. See gopher://gopher.scs.unr.edu/00/veronica/veronica-faq for more information on veronica.
ON THE WEB:
For a listing of gopher sites, see
In the simplest definition, Usenet news (also called netnews or simply news) is a forum for online discussion. Many computers around the world exchange chunks of information, called articles, on almost every subject imaginable. These computers aren’t physically connected to the same network; they’re logically connected in their capability to exchange data. See Chapter 34, “Surviving Usenet News,” for a complete discussion of Usenet news.
News articles on Usenet are divided into newsgroups by subject. These groups are then divided into hierarchies based on very general subject distinctions.
• See “How Usenet Is Structured,” p. 659
Usenet news has conversation and discussion on almost any topic that you can think of. It’s a great way to find and exchange information.
Another avenue for discussion on the Internet comes from e-mail mailing lists. Mailing lists vary from Usenet news in that the various messages and discussion articles are sent via e-mail rather than via the Usenet news medium.
Why use a mailing list instead of a Usenet newsgroup? Usually, mailing lists are targeted at a smaller group of people. It’s fairly difficult to set up a new newsgroup on Usenet as there are proposal, discussion, and voting periods required. Any systems administrator can set up a mailing list. Also, because each mailing list is maintained on one computer, the systems administrator has more control over who can be on the list and can deal with problem users more effectively. Some mailing lists, such as those that discuss computer security issues, are restricted to certain people. If you need to be on one of these lists, you have to apply with the list manager to be allowed to subscribe.
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