E-mail 101 · Chapter 3Part 3
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
o Saves employee time—time lost in phone tag, lost messages, and they three day time delay of surface mail.
o Avoids circuitous means of transfering data like printing a document, faxing it, and then rekeyboarding the data at the receiving end
o Allows businesses and individuals to self-publish, and distribute their work efficiently, whether or not the text or the graphical appearance is primary.
o Provides access to information, allows communication and distribution of documents in a single, uniform fashion.
It should also be clear that Internetworking is not yet a smooth, easily learned process. It requires knowledge and skills that are not presently taught anywhere except on the Internet itself.
The next section discusses specific needs of different segments of people. The final section contains a fairly systematic exposition of the methods and skills needed to Internetwork effectively. But far from representing these sections as the last word on the subject, I would like to stress that the only way to learn Internetworking is through undirected exploration of the Internet.
This means you have to let your employees play, at least on their own time: play with programs, play with Anonymous FTP, and play with Usenet news. None of these activities are directly productive, but the playing pays off when you need a new program and someone in your office can
o pick the right Usenet newsgroup and retrieve its FAQ
o read the FAQ and learn about free software that will solve your problem and where to find the latest version
o connect to the software archive and (correctly) transfer the program—even though the intervening machine is of the "wrong" make.
o properly decompress and install the software.
When all this is done competently, in less than half an hour, you will have attained the goal of employee development.
A final caveat: *don't neglect Usenet news.* Usenet news is the most difficult of the "Internet basic services" to get because it is not really an Internet service. It is commonly found on Internet computers and commonly transmitted over the Internet, but it does not fit into the E-mail-FTP-telnet scheme of things. If your Internet provider does not provide the news, you may have to ferret it out by (1) getting an account on a public access UNIX system and (2) learning to use UNIX. Command-line UNIX is no easier than command-line MS-DOS, but it is worth learning how to get on a UNIX system for the "rn" (readnews) command alone. All you need to know to get that far (and more) is contained in Appendix D.
Any guide like this will soon be dated in terms of information sources, techniques, and software. But Usenet is up to the minute. There, hidden among the many diversions of alt., talk., and soc. hierarchies, is the latest information on the computing environment of modern Internetworking. In the opinion of this author, learning to use a newsreader and reading the network news regularly is the *single most important Internetworking skill*. The Usenet newsgroups are Dewey Decimal System of the the true world library. Information can be found in plenty elsewhere, but guides to information are rare and priceless— and the Usenet news is the guide to the Internet.
<Part II> Special Concerns
This Part lists briefly some of the ways in which various groups of people can use internetworking skills.
<Chapter 11> Special for Businesses
I wish I had better news for business use of the Internet. I wish I could describe hundreds of free services of interest to *business* and tell you how to use the Internet for profit. But it's not there yet. However, before you turn away with a sad but knowing smile on your face shaking your head over another unlikely technological dream—you've seen it before—consider this: the main potential of the Internet is as a communication medium. Is radio and television important to businesses? What about newspapers and magazines? Or direct mail? Very few businesses make money by selling newspapers or operating radio stations, but many, many businesses use these media for advertising. You and your employees need to become adept at using this medium for the same reasons you've mastered layout of newpaper ads and writing form letters.
It is very important to understand that the Internet is not a broadcast medium but more like the telephone or mail system. It specializes in contacting individuals one at a time. In other words, you are not going to get a list of all 25 million E-mail addresses and bombard them every 10 minutes with a 30 second sound byte. Nor are you going to send 100 people a letter asking them to contact 100 persons each. On the other hand you might use the medium to contact a mailing list of your customers or self-publish a promotional brochure.
The amount of commercial traffic on the Internet is disappointingly small—but important. Mostly this is for historical reasons. The backbone network in the United States, NSFnet (for National Science Foundation) has an "acceptable use" policy for traffic carried over it. This restricts traffic to messages that support the R&D effort of certain government laboratories and universities. Clearly, there is not room for commercial traffic if you are directly connected to the NSFnet.
But nowadays one can get on the Internet without connecting directly to NSFnet, and the amount of commercial traffic is growing. Don't overlook:
o Making product information and brochures available by E-mail as well as by the postal service.
o Allowing customer-support inquiries by E-mail.
o Starting a mailing list for your customers or clients.
o Setting up a "mail-server" to let clients get information about your product automatically, without having to wait for you to log on (required direct connection to the Internet).
o Putting your product information on an anonymous FTP server (requires that you have a fileserver on the net or find an FTP site willing to take the information).
Suprisingly, there are, to my knowledge, no pay-for-advertising services that support mailservers or anonymous FTP sites. It is a fair prediction that this advertising medium will develop as more persons join the net. You could put your information on bulletin boards, of course, but only members will see it there—not the 25 million people with E-mail access.
The fact remains, however, that unless you are in very specific industries that are information or paper intensive (say publishing, computing, information retrieval, and so on), or unless you need access to government information like weather maps, that your use of the Internet will consist of downloading programs or getting the latest technical information.
All of this overlooks the most important aspect of the Internet for businesses. The Internet is evolving very rapidly. It is likely to be an important medium for transacting business, for customer service and for advertising in the very near future no matter what industry you are in. For some industries, like publishing, high-technology industries, and the media, it will be critical. Businesses who have a pool of employees that are adept at using the Internet will have a competitive advantage over firms that don't. Thus you should encourage your employees to get personal Internet connections and learn about the Internet after hours.
<Chapter 12> Special for Students and their Parents
Since the Internet grew up in an academic environment, university students will likely have a level of access that would be the envy of any business. All the services and research tools—not just E-mail, FTP, and telnet, but gopher, WWW, WAIS, and the rest are likely to be available to students from any terminal on the local "cluster" or by dial-up from their dorm rooms.
Students will be especially keen on:
o checking the university library catalogue to see if a book is in before walking to the library.
o finding out about campus events (even at other universities!) through gopher or school bulletin boards
o posting buy and sell notices for computer equipment, cars, housing, and so on.
o contacting potential tutors either at their own university or for help by E-mail. (A netwide "university" of tutors, called Usenet University, is prepared to answer questions in various subjects by E- mail already exists in the Usenet newsgroups. See the alt.uu.* hierarchy).
o using online catalogues of other university libraries to find books for interlibrary loan or to compile bibliographies
o downloading free software and information
o finding scholarship information
Parents can communicate with their children at college by E-mail—and probably get a faster response than waiting for the occasional letter from home. Worried parents will have to refrain, however, from using the "finger" command to find out when their children last logged in or read their mail!
<Chapter 13> Special for Writers, Journalists, Publishers, and Printers
There is probably no industry for which information is so critical as for the media and publishing industries. Journalists who explore the networks will find that they use the tools described in the first part over and over to track down information, conduct prompt "interviews" by mail, and so on. Publishers will be interested in the electronic transmission of manuscripts (though writers soliciting publication will still want to send hardcopy—the equivalent in the electronic age of sending a self-addressed stamped envelope). Publishers will also be interested in sharing or developing free image processing software with other publishers, and transmitting graphics.
As the net develops, libraries research will more and more often involve internetworking. Searching for books is already easy by dial-up or over the Internet. In addition, the amount of information that is never circlulated on paper will increase. This is already the case in the scientific and technical community where printing is a luxury rather than a necessity. Given that a single 8 mm videotape can hold 500,000 pages of text, it is possible to hoard (and search) vast amounts of information that you can never possibly print out. Imagine what such technology will do in the hands of Government or any other bureaucracy. Finally, it is not hard to image the day when an editor will receive as many press releases by E-mail as through the postal service.
Internetworking technology allows virtually any business or individual to set up and run their own "wire service", providing information about their business or special interest to a select group of subscribers. This capability is completely analogous to Desk Top Publishing, which put low-end printing in the hands of any business or individual.
Journalists and other writers will not want to overlook the kaleidascopic mixture of technical discussion, product announcements, gossip, and general ranting on Usenet. Usenet already has more channels than a typcial satellite and is growing by ten channels a day or so. It is hard to find, but tucked in among the chit-chat and programs is the only up to the minute information on the Internetworked World. Certainly all writers of scientific or technical columns will want to tap this source of information.
<Chapter 14> Special for Elementary and High School Teachers
There are many special Internet services for Elementary and Secondary School teachers provided by the Government, mostly through the education offices of research laboratories. The best all around refernce for teachers is the NCSA Guide to the Internet, put out by the Education Office of the National Center for Supercompter Administration. A paper version is available from:
The network version is located at ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Unfortunately, it is available only in Microsoft Word format (requires binary transfer). If you are unable to use this format directly or convert to a format you can use, you will have to order the paper version.
The NCSA Guide covers all you need to know to connect to the Internet— both technical details and etiquette—as well as suggested projects to introduce children to the net. You will find out how to get information about the space program or how to access such programs as the Newton Bulletin Board Service for Science and Math. teachers at Argonne National Laboratory.
In addition, Usenet has a k12.* hierarchy which provides a gateway to the K12 network. Besides K12, there are several other regional networks specifically for teachers and students.
One of the more exciting prospects for teachers is that of sharing worksheets, handouts, and other materials with other teachers. Although this type of sharing is routine on bulletin boards and regional networks that cater to teachers, anonymous FTP sites hold out the possibility of a worldwide collection of such materials. Send contributed materials (in electronic format) to
ftp.cs.city.ac.uk:/freelore/incoming
by following the instructions in Chapter xx for sending a file by anonymous FTP, or mail a floppy disk (and a return mailer with prepaid postage, if you want it back!) to
The FreeLore Project P.O. Box 6022 St. Charles, IL 60174.
Make sure your materials have a copyright notice like this course, allowing anyone to copy and distribute them for free (for educational purposes).
<Chapter 15> Special for Librarians
For many years, of course, libraries have been among the heaviest users of information services—for cataloguing or to fill patron requests. Several companies now specialize in providing Internet access to libraries, e.g. ACCESS or DRAnet. Libraries will increasingly use these services because the promise the following benefits:
o Inexpensive access to hundreds of online library catalogues, worldwide.
o Uniform, and often cheaper, access to information services using telnet rather than a host of special software packages.
o Access to netwide searching tools like WAIS, WWW, and GOPHER.
o Discussion by E-mail with other librarians, conference reports and announcements, and so on.
It is true, as one librarian said to me, that you can tell that librarians didn't set up the Internet. The archives grew piecemeal and their contents are far from uniform in quality. In addition, the whole Internet is so vast it probably can't be catalogued. Nevertheless, rough and ready tools and customs have grown up to provide some sort of access to the information that is "out there". There is a great deal of work to be done by librarians that will doubtless keep them employed into the next millenium.
The main boon to librarians is the hierarchical organization of the net into nodes, directories, and subdirectories. These provide an implicit and universal call number to *everything in the electronic world*. The day is not far away when a cross-reference like
See ota.ox.ac.uk:/pub/HistoricalDocs/Political/US/constitution
will be as common as a bibliographic citation or See reference in a card catalogue.
The Internet also carries a number of hidden expenses and dangers to libraries:
o It will somewhat increase the expense of computer equipment, technical personnel, software, etc. needed by libraries
o Additional phone lines may become necessary, especially if some sort of public access to the Internet is contemplated
o Staff training needs will be greater
o The local computer system will need virus protection software and regular backups (a good idea anyway but seldom practiced by librarians, in my experience. Persons who are trained in book conservation should know better!).
o Some material on the Internet will arouse complaints from the public because it represents the views of unpopular minorities (e.g liberals, homosexuals, feminists, and intellectuals). There is also a great deal of pornographic material (text and graphics) available by E- mail or through the Usenet newsgroups. Issues of censorship, public funding, and access for minors have yet to be played out in the domain of electronic communications.
In addition to the standard package of services from your provider, librarians should not neglect Usenet Newgroups, even if this means getting a special account with a different service (and accessing it by dial-up or telnet through your primary service). Learning to use the Usenet Newgroups and their invaluable FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) is the *single most important skill for professional development of your staff.* This means that you may want to encourage after-hours "playing" with your computer system. Think of the Usenet Newsgroups as the Reference Section of the Internet.
<Chapter 16> Special for Scholars
It used to be that only scientists and technologists used the academic networks. But no longer. Today there are many humanists and social scientists happily gabbing away with their friends (oops . . . I mean colleagues) at other universities, collaborating by E-mail, subscribing to and writing for E-journals, and so on. This is, of course, in addition to the academic computing environment described in the Chapter for students.
Your main entree to this world is some sort of E-mail access and finding a mailing list or newsgroup for your field. From there you will pick up tips on interesting materials or groups to join—in short you can start networking. The two main sources for such mailing lists are LISTSERVERS (traditional on BITNET) and increasingly Usenet Newsgroups. Actually the newsgroups are not as useful as the lists at the moment *for the humanities*. This is because the academic hierarchy is not as subdivided as the computer science hierarchy. Thus, there is a whole hierarchy for computer science, but all of linguistics fits into sci.lang! These discussion groups either tend to have just a few participants or to be so all-encompassing that they are useless. This does not mean you should ignore Usenet—the computer and networking information is invaluable—just that you will not find it *directly* relevant to your field.
Listservers are another matter. They allow distribution of articles by anyone to the whole list (unless the list is moderated, i.e. refereed by the list's owner), and they allow archiving of articles at a place anyone on the list can access. In short, they form a sort of Electronic Journal with a *very* big reader mail column. To find a list in your field, send the message "INDEX GLOBAL" to any listserver. These usually have an address like "listserv@hoople.usnd.edu". Then send a message like "SUBSCRIBE PDQFAN" to the listserver to join the list PDQFAN. After that you will send messages for publication to "pdqfan@hoople.usnd.edu" and (human) service requests to "pdqfan- request@hoople.usnd.edu".
The best way to use a listserver is to avail yourself of the "SET PDQFAN DIGEST" or "SET <whateverlist> DIGEST" command so that you get the (daily?) mailing as a newspaper and not as a series of fifty or so mail messages interspersed throughout the day. The digest includes *your own* correspondence so that you have a record of this. This is not what happens without the DIGEST option. For full instructions send the message "HELP" to "listserv@whereever.edu".
Ultimately the Humanities will have the same infrastructure of services that already is forming in the Sciences:
o easy access to preprints and collections of journal articles
o archives of data sets, special purpose free software, and text databases.
o collections of E-text source materials, if relevant. These may include "tagged" text for special statistical studies.
o a set of free programming tools for routine scholarly tasks like typesetting papers, creating bibliographic databases, and so on—in the format specific to your field.
Scholars in the humanities should check the list of E-text archives (over 300 of them) at Georgetown University (send E-mail message "" to "" to get started). These archives may well have materials in your field that they will make available for scholarly purposes at a nominal cost. In addition, check the Oxford Text Archives at black.ox.ac.uk. (Login as "anonymous" for information—as of this writing the archives are not searchable online by telnet, but an index is available).
<Chapter 17> Special for Churches, Synagogues, and Mosques
It is suprising that religious organizations have been so slow to recognize the importance of a new communications medium like the Internet. Many religious organizations use computers for producing newsletters or accounting and other office tasks; but very few use them effectively for telecommunication and internetworking.
The Internet is not like Television or Radio—it is not a broadcast medium. In many ways the Internet is a more appropriate communications medium for religions organizations than "the media". It is less expensive, not centrally controlled, and reaches persons who want to receive the information on a case-by-case basis.
There is nothing to prevent a religious organization from setting up a fileserver on one of the commercial nets (admittedly expensive, but you only need one worldwide). From there any member of your organization can upload and download information. Thus you can keep a library of regional or local newsletters, special software, a directory of local groups, listings of job openings, and so on. Many organizations already have this sort of thing on Bulletin Boards, but FTP archives and E-mail provide a less expensive method of disseminating information that can reach anywhere in the world, not just a local region or single area code.
But the promise of internetworking goes beyond the "office environment" of your organization—which I am sure is already well developed—to touch your educational and evangelical mission. You can make information about your organization and its beliefs instantly available to 25 million people if they want it.
In addition, there is a great need for "charity work" in preparing E- texts. Most E-texts are copyrighted or locked up in proprietary databases. This means that they cannot be freely shared. Free E-texts, especially those written in plain "vanilla" ASCII, are in great demand among blind people—who can use special software to convert the text to sound—and by persons in remote areas or the third world.
Distribution of free E-text is not limited to the Internet by any means. Free E-text will find its way onto thousands of bulletin boards and will be passed to non-networked machines by floppy disks. Once printed out it can be disseminated by photocopying or any inexpensive printing method that uses "camera-ready" copy. The Internet is thus the backbone of a worldwide distribution network that can reach anyplace sophisticated enough to have some sort of printing (or delivery) technology.
There are basically two ways to create free E-text: you can type or scan in something in the public domain (75 years old or older) or you can create new text that has a copyright notice like this one allowing anyone to copy and distribute the text. It is not enough merely to sell the information at a nominal cost. Unless you allow others the right to further distribute information it is not really "free", even if you sometimes give it away at no cost on a floppy disk.
In fact, the only *free* religious literature (and typing even this in was quite an accomplishment) consists of: The King James Bible (without Apocrypha), the Quran, the Nicene Creed, The Book of Mormon and related texts, the Bible in Hebrew, and the Kama Sutra. Certainly the various denominations should consider releasing their basic liturgical texts and a selection of their religious literature in free E-text form. Modern versions of the Bible are a problem because of copyright restrictions. It would certainly be a boon for some organization to make a modern version "free" in the sense that anyone could copy and distribute it.
<Part III> Advanced Techniques
<Chapter 18> Research Methods I: Basic Navigation Methods
The Internet is certainly a vast place. For the beginner, or for the experienced user who wants to do more than check an occasional bibliographic cross-reference to an FTP site, a navigation tool is almost essential. The three most common navigation tools are discussed here. They represent three different approaches to stategy, target constituency, target materials, and user interface (the part of the program that you see). The three services are known as GOPHER, the WIDE AREA INFORMATION SERVICE (WAIS, pron. "ways"), and the WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW or W3).
All three services are based on client-server technology. To make information *available* to others you need special software called a server. The user then uses a "client" program to access the information. "Clients" are often free—they are written by whoever funded the initial project or by volunteer hackers. The catch to using a client is that you have to have a *direct* (usually expensive) connection to the Internet. This is the main reason that a SLIP connection will become more and more important. It "fools" the net into thinking that you have a direct connection without the expense of hooking your computer to a Local Area Network and then to the Internet. You can use a client program on your own home or office computer if you have a SLIP connection.
Even if you don't yet have a SLIP connection—they're still a bit experimental—you can use the services listed here. As of this writing all three services allow free access to a client for demonstration purposes. There are a number of telnet addresses where you can try out these navigation tools. I expect that, as the traffic on the network increases, these public access sites will close down. But by then communications programs will routinely include SLIP and probably some version of the major "clients" as well.
One word of caution: all the services here are built on top of telnet and FTP. They just provide a different and perhaps more useful way of making Internet connections. Thus, the same service may appear in several guises, depending on the tool you use to connect to it. There are also gateways that let you access one service from the other—but often at a price in terms of useability. Since the software may not tell you that you are looking at, say, a Gopher-based service via WWW, you may have to try all three services to find the one that makes the most reliable connection.
Another factor to consider is that unless you have a direct or SLIP connection, you will be limited to using a command line interface. You will not experience the real power of, at least, WWW or WAIS. Nevertheless they are useful. In general, a beginner should use gopher first, then play with the other two services to see if they are useful to you.
The main problem you will have is *getting* the information you find. If you do not have the client program, this is difficult. You could cut and paste the information from your screen or use your communications program's "buffer" to store it. WAIS will send you the results of your search by E-mail. Often, you will have to resort to FTP to fetch the information once you have located it—if you can figure out where you are. One of my criticisms of search tools like Gopher or WAIS is that they often give you a very poor indication of where the information you found is physically located. This is especially true of the publically accessible versions.
<Section 18.1> Gopher
Gopher was created by two students, xx and xx, at the University of Minnesota. It provides a menu-like view of that part of the Internet where Gopher servers are found, "gopherspace". Gopher has spread to many universities. You can search student directories and campus calendars, as well as the usual internet resources. It is by far the easiest way to explore the net without entering numerous FTP and telnet commands.
Since Gopher is the oldest and most decentralized of the services, it provides the most extensive access to useful services. Online library catalogues, the Project Gutenberg library, FTP archives, and numerous exits to telnet.
The telnet access to demonstration Gopher systems (and through them to Gopher servers on *any* campus) is through:
xxx.xxx.xxx
Students will of course want to use Gopher directly from their school's system. Try typing "gopher" at any prompt.
<Section 18.2> Wide Area Information Services (WAIS)
WAIS was developed in a very different environment from Gopher. It was developed by a joint collaboration of Thinking Machines, Inc. (Artificial Intellegence technology), Dow Jones News Retrieval (Information systems), and Apple Computer (User interface). Its ability to find information given a plain English description of what you want ("hey, find everthing on Personal Computers and Health) is truely mind- boggling. It returns a list of "hits" together with a likelihood that it contains what you wanted. It can also look for documents that are "something like" a sample document.
The user interface is a pleasure to use—but requires a direct or SLIP connection to the Internet. The line-oriented version that is publically available is a pale imitation of the real thing.
WAIS strength is its ability to retrieve information from almost any source, not just FTP sites. A list of all WAIS sources is maintained in a directory-of-directories (available at think.com). You import a set of instructions on how to access a given information server to create your own personalized list of sources.
This service is probably the one of greatest interest to business (i.e. non-academic and non-library) users. To try out WAIS, telnet think.com and log in as SWAIS.
<Section 18.3> World Wide Web (WWW or W3)
The newest of the three services is the World Wide Web. It was created at the European European Center for High Energy Physics (CERN). It is based on yet another technology (besides FTP and client-server)— hypertext. The World Wide Web views the entire complex of FTP sites as a single "document" with cross-references.
A WWW server lets you read that document and jump to any cross-reference that you find—hence the term "hypertext". The result is rather like a menu driven system but (at least in the graphical interface versions) you stay inside the familiar context of a text editor. If you can imagine clicking on a cross-reference and having your text editor fetch the document from an FTP site you will get the idea.