Q15.5: What about all these Internet Services?

The Internet supports a variety of on-line services, and a number of tools are available to enable people to make good use of these, including: telnet, FTP, gopher, veronica, archie, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the World-Wide Web (WWW). Information about using Internet is available from a number of sources, many accesible on-line, via email or FTP. For example, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) publishes two guides for novices on all the Internet has to offer, by Adam Gaffin and Jörg Heitkötter (see below). These are avaiable over the net. To receive a short guide to using anonymous FTP, send e-mail with the text "help" to <info@sunsite.unc.edu>. If you dont have FTP access, you can retrieve documents using the FTP-by-email service. The "ftpmail" service is installed on several sites to allow transmission of FTPable files from almost anywhere. To get the PostScript version of this FAQ from ENCORE, (See Q15.3) for example, send a message to (for example) <ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com> containing the lines:

	  reply <your-own-e-mail-address-here>
	  connect alife.santafe.edu
	  get pub/USER-AREA/EC/FAQ/hhgtec.ps.gz
	  quit

FTPmail sites available are listed below. Use one that is near you for best performance.

    (USA)     <ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com>
	      <ftpmail@sunsite.unc.edu>
	      <bitftp@pucc.princeton.edu>

    (Europe)  <bitftp@dearn> or to <bitftp@vm.gmd.de>
	      <ftpmail@ftp.uni-stuttgart.de>
	      <ftpmail@ftp.inf.tu-dresden.de>
	      <ftpmail@grasp.insa-lyon.fr>
	      <bitftp@plearn.edu.pl>
	      <ftpmail@doc.ic.ak.uk>

Documents from the archive at <rtfm.mit.edu> can be retrieved similarly by sending email to <mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu>, containing a message such as:

     send usenet/news.answers/index
     send usenet/news.answers/ai-faq/genetic/part1
     quit

References

Kehoe, B.P. (1992) "Zen and the Art of the Internet: A Beginner's Guide to the Internet", 2nd Edition (July). Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 112 pages. The 1st Edition, (February) is available in PostScript format via anonymous FTP from ftp://ftp.cs.widener.edu: and many other Internet archives.

Krol, E. (1992) "The Whole Internet: Catalog & User's Guide". O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA. 376 pages.

LaQuey, T. and J.C. Ryer (1992) "The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking". Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading, MA. 208 pages.

Smith, Una R. (1993) "A Biologist's Guide to Internet Resources." USENET sci.answers FTP and e-mail from many archives, eg. ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/sci.answers/biology/guide/part?

Gaffin, A. (1994) "Everybody's Guide to the Internet." Published by the EFF and MIT Press. $14.95. ISBN 9-780262-67105-7. This book is available in ASCII by sending e-mail to <netguide@eff.org>; you'll receive the book split into several pieces; for a more elaborate version of the guide see the following entry.

Gaffin, A. with Heitkötter, J. (1994) "EFF's (Extended) Guide to the Internet: A round trip through Global Networks, Life in Cyberspace, and Everything...", aka `eegtti.texi'. This is available from ftp://ftp.eff.org/pub/Net_info/Net_Guide/Other_versions/ (Texinfo, ASCII, HTML, DVI and PostScript). The European edition is kept on ftp://ftp.de.uu.net/pub/books/eff-guide/ ~300 pages. A README file gives more information. The hypertext (HTML) version can be browsed at: http://www.de.uu.net/books/eegtti/eegtti.html

The EARN Association (May 1993) "A Guide to Network Resource Tools", available via e-mail from <listserv@EARNCC.bitnet>, by sending the message "get nettools ps" (PostScript) or "get nettools memo" (plain text).