Internet Services

Many ways to surf the Net.

The World Wide Web is only one of the many services available on the Internet. Here's a brief synopsis of ten Internet services:

archie Archie servers catalog the names of files residing on many Internet ftp sites and index keywords about those files. Using archie, you can obtain a list of files that match your keyword, as well as the ftp server where each file is located. Once you know which file you want, you use ftp to fetch it. An archie search can save you a tremendous amount of work because you don't have to log in to hundreds of hosts and search each one individually.

Electronic mail (e-mail) Internet mail uses the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP) to transport e-mail messages across the Internet.

file transfer protocol ( ftp ) Ftp lets you copy files from one computer to another or across a network (the Internet, for example). In most cases, you're required to log in to the remote computer before you can obtain access to any of the files. Some systems, however, are meant to offer files to the public. For this purpose, anonymous ftp exists, wherein you log in with the user name "anonymous," and your IP address serves as your password.

gopher Gopher is an easy-to-use, menu-oriented search tool. Gopher servers catalog information by subject area, and the menu structure lets you "drill down" to successively more specific topics. Gopher includes a plain-text viewer, which enables you to view individual files (if they're text-only) so you can determine whether those files are what you're looking for. Gopher will fetch the file for you, saving you from the need to use ftp to retrieve the file. Gopher sites are interconnected , such that selecting a particular menu item may leapfrog you to a different gopher server. Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota, where the "mother gopher" still resides.

Network news You can post a message on a particular topic, and it will be widely disseminated to a distribution list of subscribers. These topic-oriented BBSs are known as newsgroups. The underlying messaging protocol used is the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP).

telnet   This is a terminal-emulation program that runs on your PC and emulates a terminal for some host computer. A key difference between telnet and earlier terminals is that while terminals originally used RS-232 serial connections or some other type of terminal cable to connect to the host computer, telnet uses the network to make the link.

veronica The veronica system indexes the menus of all of the gopher servers. The collection of all the menus in all the gopher servers is known as "gopherspace," and veronica gives you a powerful way to search all of gopherspace for the subject in which you're interested.

Wide Area Information Service (WAIS)   Instead of indexing file names (as archie does, for example), WAIS indexes the text within the files, allowing you to find information that might not be stored in file names.

World Wide Web   The World Wide Web is a networked, graphically oriented, hypermedia system. It uses the hypertext transport protocol (http) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

This tutorial, number 94, by Alan Frank, was originally published in the June 1996 issue of LAN Magazine/Network Magazine.