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

sounds/ = (dir) Short sound samples

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ftp>

When you switch to a directory, don’t include the /.

7 p.m. – 7 a.m.

potemkin.cs.pdx.edu The Bob Dylan archive. Interviews, notes,

year-by-year accounts of his life and more, in the pub/dylan directory.

9 p.m. – 9 a.m.

ftp.nevada.edu Guitar chords for contemporary songs are in the

pub/guitar directory, in subdirectories organized by group or artist.

NATIVE AMERICANS

pines.hsu.edu Home of IndianNet, this site contains a variety

of directories and files related to Indians and Eskimos, including

federal census data, research reports and a tribal profiles database.

Look in the pub and indian directories.

PETS

rtfm.mit.edu The pub/usenet/rec.pets.dogs and

pub/usenet.rec.pets.cats directories have documents on the respective

animals. See under Books for a caveat in using this ftp site.

6 p.m. – 6 a.m.

PICTURES

wuarchiv.wustl.edu The graphics/gif directory contains hundreds of

GIF photographic and drawing images, from cartoons to cars, space images

to pop stars. These are arranged in a long series of subdirectories.

PHOTOGRAPHY

ftp.nevada.edu Photolog is an online digest of photography news, in

the pub/photo directory.

RELIGION

nptn.org In the pub/e.texts/religion directory, you’ll find

subdirectories for chapters and books of both the Bible and the Koran.

Available 24 hours.

SCIENCE FICTION

elbereth.rutgers.edu In the pub/sfl directory, you’ll find plot

summaries for various science-fiction TV shows, including Star Trek (not

only the original and Next Generation shows, but the cartoon version as

well), Lost in Space, Battlestar Galactica, the Twilight Zone, the

Prisoner and Doctor Who. There are also lists of various things related

to science fiction and an online science-fiction fanzine.

6 p.m. – 6 a.m.

SEX

rtfm.mit.edu Look in the pub/usenet/alt.sex and

pub/usenet/alt.sex.wizards directories for documents related to all

facets of sex. See under Books for a caveat in using this ftp site.

6 p.m. – 6 a.m.

SHAKESPEARE

atari.archive.umich.edu The shakespeare directory contains most of

the Bard’s works. A number of other sites have his works as well, but

generally as one huge mega-file. This site breaks them down into various

categories (comedies, poetry, histories, etc.) so that you can download

individual plays or sonnets.

SPACE

ames.arc.nasa.gov Stores text files about space and the history of

the NASA space program in the pub/SPACE subdirectory. In the pub/GIF

and pub/SPACE/GIF directories, you’ll find astronomy- and NASA-related

GIF files, including pictures of planets, satellites and other celestial

objects.

9 p.m. – 9 a.m.

TV

coe.montana.edu The pub/TV/Guides directory has histories and other

information about dozens of TV shows. Only two anonymous-ftp log-ins are

allowed at a time, so you might have to try more than once to get in.

8 p.m. – 8 a.m.

ftp.cs.widener.edu The pub/simpsons directory has more files than

anybody could possibly need about Bart and family. The pub/strek

directory has files about the original and Next Generation shows as well

as the movies.

See also under Science Fiction.

TRAVEL

nic.stolaf.edu Before you take that next overseas trip, you might

want to see whether the State Department has issued any kind of advisory

for the countries on your itinerary. The advisories, which cover

everything from hurricane damage to civil war, are in the pub/travel-

advisories/advisories directory, arranged by country.

7 p.m. – 7 a.m.

USENET

ftp.uu.net In the usenet directory, you’ll find “frequently asked

questions” files, copied from rtfm.mit.edu. The communications

directory holds programs that let MS-DOS users connect directly with UUCP

sites. In the info directory, you’ll find information about ftp and ftp

sites. The inet directory contains information about Internet.

Available 24 hours.

rtfm.mit.edu This site contains all available “frequently

asked questions” files for Usenet newsgroups in the pub/usenet directory.

See under Books for a caveat in using this ftp site.

6 p.m. – 6 a.m.

VIRUSES

ftp.unt.edu The antivirus directory has anti-virus programs for MS-

DOS and Macintosh computers.

7 p.m. – 7 a.m.

WEATHER

wuarchive.wustl.edu The /multimedia/images/wx directory contains GIF

weather images of North America. Files are updated hourly and take this

general form: CV100222. The first two letters tell the type of file: CV

means it is a visible-light photo taken by a weather satellite. CI

images are similar, but use infrared light. Both these are in black and

white. Files that begin with SA are color radar maps of the U.S. that

show severe weather patterns but also fronts and temperatures in major

cities. The numbers indicate the date and time (in GMT – five hours

ahead of EST) of the image: the first two numbers represent the month,

the next two the date, the last two the hour. The file WXKEY.GIF explains

the various symbols in SA files.

7.7 ncftp — NOW YOU TELL ME!

If you’re lucky, the people who run your host system or public-

access site have installed a program called ncftp, which takes some of

the edges off the ftp process.

For starters, when you use ncftp instead of plain old ftp, you no

longer have to worry about misspelling “anonymous” when you connect. The

program does it for you. And once you’re in, instead of getting line

after line filled with dashes, x’s, r’s and d’s, you only get listings of

the files or directories themselves (if you’re used to MS-DOS, the

display you get will be very similar to that produced by the dir/w

command). The program even creates a list of the ftp sites you’ve used

most recently, so you can pick from that list, instead of trying to

remember some incredibly complex ftp site name.

Launching the program, assuming your site has it, is easy. At the

command prompt, type

ncftp sitename

where “sitename” is the site you want to reach (alternately, you could

type just ncftp and then use its open command). Once connected, you can

use the same ftp commands you’ve become used to, such as ls, get and

mget. Entries that end in a / are directories to which you can switch

with cd; others are files you can get. A couple of useful ncftp commands

include type, which lets you change the type of file transfer (from ASCII

to binary for example) and size, which lets you see how large a file is

before you get it, for example

size declaration.txt

would tell you how large the declaration.txt file is before you get it.

When you say “bye” to disconnect from a site, ncftp remembers the last

directory you were in, so that the next time you connect to the site, you

are put back into that directory automatically. If you type

help

you’ll get a list of files you can read to extend the power of the

program even further.

7.8 PROJECT GUTENBERG — ELECTRONIC BOOKS

Project Gutenberg, coordinated by Michael Hart, has a fairly

ambitious goal: to make more than 10,000 books and other documents

available electronically by the year 2001. In 1993, the project uploaded

an average of four books a month to its ftp sites; in 1994, they hope to

double the pace.

Begun in 1971, the project already maintains a “library” of hundreds

of books and stories, from Aesop’s Fables to “Through the Looking Glass”

available for the taking. It also has a growing number of current-

affairs documents, such as the CIA’s annual “World Factbook” almanac.

Besides nptn.org, Project Gutenberg texts can be retrieved from

mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu in the etext directory.

7.9 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG

You get a “host unavailable” message. The ftp site is down for

some reason.

Try again later.

You get a “host unknown” message.

Check your spelling of the site name.

You misspell “anonymous” when logging in and get a message

telling you a password is required for whatever you typed in.

Type something in, hit enter, type bye, hit enter, and try again.

Alternately, try typing “ftp” instead of “anonymous.” It will work on a

surprising number of sites. Or just use ncftp, if your site has it, and

never worry about this again.

7.10 FYI

Liberal use of archie will help you find specific files or

documents. For information on new or interesting ftp sites, try the

comp.archives newsgroup on Usenet. You can also look in the comp.misc,

comp.sources.wanted or news.answers newsgroups on Usenet for lists of ftp

sites posted every month by Tom Czarnik and Jon Granrose.

The comp.archives newsgroup carries news of new ftp sites and

interesting new files on existing sites.

In the comp.virus newsgroup on Usenet, look for postings that list

ftp sites carrying anti-viral software for Amiga, MS-DOS, Macintosh,

Atari and other computers.

The comp.sys.ibm.pc.digest and comp.sys.mac.digest newsgroups

provide information about new MS-DOS and Macintosh programs as well as

answers to questions from users of those computers.

Chapter 8: GOPHERS, WAISs AND THE WORLD-WIDE WEB

8.1. GOPHERS

Even with tools like Hytelnet and archie, telnet and ftp can still

be frustrating. There are all those telnet and ftp addresses to

remember. Telnet services often have their own unique commands. And,

oh, those weird directory and file names!

But now that the Net has become a rich repository of information,

people are developing ways to make it far easier to find and retrieve

information and files. Gophers and Wide-Area Information Servers (WAISs)

are two services that could ultimately make the Internet as easy to

navigate as commercial networks such as CompuServe or Prodigy.

Both gophers and WAISs essentially take a request for information

and then scan the Net for it, so you don’t have to. Both also work

through menus — instead of typing in some long sequence of characters,

you just move a cursor to your choice and hit enter. Gophers even

let you select files and programs from ftp sites this way.

Let’s first look at gophers (named for the official mascot of the

University of Minnesota, where the system was developed).

Many public-access sites now have gophers online. To use one, type

gopher

at the command prompt and hit enter. If you know your site does not have

a gopher, or if nothing happens