Big Dummy's Guide To The Internet by Electronic Frontier Foundation (early reader chapter books .txt) 📕

to hit “n” (or vice-versa) when

exiting and now all your messages have disappeared. Look in your News

directory (at the command line, type: cd News) for a file called

recieved. Those are all your messages. Unfortunately, there’s no way to

get them back into your Elm mailbox — you’ll have to download the file

or read it online.

Chapter 3: USENET I

3.1 THE GLOBAL WATERING HOLE

Imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days,

as if people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. Or

imagine the electronic equivalent of a radio talk show where everybody

can put their two cents in and no one is ever on hold.

Unlike e-mail, which is usually “one-to-one,” Usenet is “many-to-

many.” Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to

meet their friends, discuss the day’s events, keep up with computer

trends or talk about whatever’s on their mind. Jumping into a Usenet

discussion can be a liberating experience. Nobody knows what you look or

sound like, how old you are, what your background is. You’re judged

solely on your words, your ability to make a point.

To many people, Usenet IS the Net. In fact, it is often confused

with Internet. But it is a totally separate system. All Internet sites

CAN carry Usenet, but so do many non-Internet sites, from sophisticated

Unix machines to old XT clones and Apple IIs.

Technically, Usenet messages are shipped around the world, from

host system to host system, using one of several specific Net

protocols. Your host system stores all of its Usenet messages in one

place, which everybody with an account on the system can access. That

way, no matter how many people actually read a given message, each

host system has to store only one copy of it. Many host systems “talk”

with several others regularly in case one or another of their links goes

down for some reason. When two host systems connect, they basically

compare notes on which Usenet messages they already have. Any that one

is missing the other then transmits, and vice-versa. Because they are

computers, they don’t mind running through thousands, even millions, of

these comparisons every day.

Yes, millions. For Usenet is huge. Every day, Usenet users

pump upwards of 40 million characters a day into the system — roughly

the equivalent of volumes A-G of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Obviously,

nobody could possibly keep up with this immense flow of messages. Let’s

look at how to find conferences and discussions of interest to you.

The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a

collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these

would be called conferences, forums, bboards or special-interest

groups). There are now more than 5,000 of these newsgroups, in several

diferent languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from

science fiction to South Africa.

Some public-access systems, typically the ones that work through

menus, try to make it easier by dividing Usenet into several broad

categories. Choose one of those and you’re given a list of newsgroups in

that category. Then select the newsgroup you’re interested in and start

reading.

Other systems let you compile your own “reading list” so that you

only see messages in conferences you want. In both cases, conferences

are arranged in a particular hierarchy devised in the early 1980s.

Newsgroup names start with one of a series of broad topic names. For

example, newsgroups beginning with “comp.” are about particular computer-

related topics. These broad topics are followed by a series of more

focused topics (so that “comp.unix” groups are limited to discussion

about Unix). The main hierarchies are:

bionet Research biology

bit.listserv Conferences originating as Bitnet mailing lists

biz Business

comp Computers and related subjects

misc Discussions that don’t fit anywhere else

news News about Usenet itself

rec Hobbies, games and recreation

sci Science other than research biology

soc “Social” groups, often ethnically related

talk Politics and related topics

alt Controversial or unusual topics; not

carried by all sites

In addition, many host systems carry newsgroups for a particular

city, state or region. For example, ne.housing is a newsgroup where

New Englanders look for apartments. A growing number also carry K12

newsgroups, which are aimed at elementary and secondary teachers and

students. And a number of sites carry clari newsgroups, which is

actually a commercial service consisting of wire-service stories and

a unique online computer news service (more on this in chapter 10).

3.2 NAVIGATING USENET WITH nn

How do you dive right in? As mentioned, on some systems, it’s all

done through menus — you just keep choosing from a list of choices until

you get to the newsgroup you want and then hit the “read” command. On

Unix systems, however, you will have to use a “newsreader” program. Two

of the more common ones are known as rn (for “read news”) and nn (for “no

news” — because it’s supposed to be simpler to use).

For beginners, nn may be the better choice because it works with

menus — you get a list of articles in a given newsgroup and then you

choose which ones you want to see. To try it out, connect to your host

system and, at the command line, type

nn news.announce.newusers

and hit enter. After a few seconds, you should see something like

this:

Newsgroup: news.announce.newusers Articles: 22 of 22/1 NEW

a Gene Spafford 776 Answers to Frequently Asked Questions

b Gene Spafford 362 A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community

c Gene Spafford 387 Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette

d Gene Spafford 101 Hints on writing style for Usenet

e Gene Spafford 74 Introduction to news.announce

f Gene Spafford 367 USENET Software: History and Sources

g Gene Spafford 353 What is Usenet?

h taylor 241 A Guide to Social Newsgroups and Mailing Lists

i Gene Spafford 585 Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part I

j Gene Spafford 455 >Alternative Newsgroup Hierarchies, Part II

k David C Lawrenc 151 How to Create a New Newsgroup

l Gene Spafford 106 How to Get Information about Networks

m Gene Spafford 888 List of Active Newsgroups

n Gene Spafford 504 List of Moderators

o Gene Spafford 1051 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part I

p Gene Spafford 1123 Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part II

q Gene Spafford 1193 >Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, Part III

r Jonathan Kamens 644 How to become a USENET site

s Jonathan Kamen 1344 List of Periodic Informational Postings, Part I

— 15:52 — SELECT — help:? -----Top 85%-----

Explanatory postings for new users. (Moderated)

Obviously, this is a good newsgroup to begin your exploration of

Usenet! Here’s what all this means: The first letter on each line is

the letter you type to read that particular “article” (it makes sense

that a “newsgroup” would have “articles”). Next comes the name of the

person who wrote that article, followed by its length, in lines, and

what the article is about. At the bottom, you see the local time at your

access site, what you’re doing right now (i.e., SELECTing articles),

which key to hit for some help (the ? key) and how many of the articles

in the newsgroup you can see on this screen. The “(moderated)” means the

newsgroup has a “moderator” who is the only one who can directly post

messages to it. This is generally limited to groups such as this, which

contain articles of basic information, or for digests, which