Return to the Internet Fundamentals PageNew services are being added to the Internet daily. These include information in a variety of forms; text, graphics, audio and video. They also include a wide variety of programs for communications, file transfer, database access, and searching for information, people, and other network resources, etc. A list of the most common resources appears on the following pages. Many resources are duplicated at multiple sites throughout the world to provide faster and more convenient access to Internet users who are not located near the original target host. This redundancy reduces the excessive network traffic that would be created by many foreign users calling in from extremely remote sites to access the original host.
As the Internet becomes larger and more complex, the task of remembering the location of a particular resource has become increasingly difficult. Keeping track of a multitude of host computer addresses, log on/off procedures, and other details is a monumental task. The Internet, while vastly rich in resources, is simply too cumbersome for anyone to master without some helpful tools.
In an effort to solve this problem, various network "navigation" tools have been developed. Their overall intent is to make the net "transparent", so you can find things without needing to know what they are called or where they are located. Each of these tools uses a user-friendly interface to:
When a new program is successful, its author will often allow it to be copied and altered for use on other computers on the Internet. This distributes the power of the new program and provides access to users of systems with different processors than the one for which the program was originally written. Many such programs (and operating system commands) have been developed in recent years. The following pages contain discussions of the applications related to this course. A brief list of these programs and commands appears below. Beware that more than one program may exist to perform the same function on different machines. So take note of the aliases indicated below with the notation a.k.a. ("also known as"). General categories of software are denoted below by underlining.
| Service/Software | Description |
|---|---|
| Systems that store and manipulate messages for registered network users. The programs that act as post offices on the Internet are called mail servers. Programs used to access these machines are called mail clients. | |
| Ping | Tests your computer's ability to access another computer on the network by sending a data packet to it and asking it to send the packet back. |
| Finger | Gets information about registered users on a host and who is currently logged in. |
| Whois | Searches a database of registered networks for information about them. |
| Netfind | Finds information about network users or their e-mail addresses. |
| Electronic Conferencing | Messaging systems that collect and distribute messages to subscribers or allow online conferencing between multiple users. |
| Newsgroups | Topic-oriented electronic discussion systems that you can read or post messages to. News servers store and exchange articles on a wide variety of topics. News reading clients called newsreaders on users PC's maintain a record of each topic that a user is interested in and allows him or her to retrieve and view messages about those topics from a news server or post replies or new messages back to one. |
| USENET / NetNews | Other names of Internet Newsgroups. |
| Mailing Lists | These are topic oriented message distribution programs. You subscribe to a List Server via e-mail and they then e-mail to you copies of any future messages that are posted about that topic by other users. |
| Listserv | Another name for a mailing list. |
| Electronic Journals | These are electronically published magazines (a.k.a. e-zines), that are distributed by e-mail. |
| Talk and Chat | Online real-time typed communication between two (talk) or more (chat) network users. Some systems now have audio and video versions too. |
| File Transfer (FTP) | File managing software that allows users to manage, upload or download files on remote hosts known as FTP servers. Many FTP servers allow "anonymous" access by users without an account. |
| Archie (Legacy) | A resource for locating files at publicly accessible FTP sites through partial matching of file names. (The service is all but extinct now because of more powerful web-based resources.) |
| Remote Login "Telnet" | Software that allows users to connect to a remote host and use it remotely with the user's local PC acting as a character-based terminal. |
| Gopher (Legacy) | Gopherspace is (was) a massive collection of menu-oriented servers throughout the Internet that contain text files or links to other network services, including: FTP, Archie, Telnet, WAIS, etc. A Gopher Client was used to retrieve menus ("directories"), text files, and the other resources from Gopher Servers. (The service is all but extinct now because of more powerful web-based resources.) |
| VERONICA (Legacy) & JUGHEAD (Legacy) |
VERONICA, the "Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computer Archives" is (was) a gopher menu searcher that summarizes all accessible gopher menus and allows the user to perform keyword searches to construct personal gopher menus from widely dispersed gopher server sites. JUGHEAD or "Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display" tool is (was) similar to VERONICA, but newer and more powerful. JUGHEAD allowed you to limit your search to specific parts of gopherspace and allowed the use of logical operations such as AND, OR and NOT within search phrases. (These services is all but extinct now because of more powerful web-based resources.) |
| WAIS | The "Wide Area Information Server" searches pre-constructed indexes of databases to help users find documents and then view or retrieve them (the server sends you files by e-mail). |
| WWW | "World Wide Web" is a distributed database of multi-media files based on "hypertext" which is a system of cross-referenced documents containing highlighted words that allow users to jump between related documents easily using a "point and click" approach. WWW browsers - graphic based WWW clients that allow you to browse FTP, Gopher, WAIS, & WWW sites containing multi-media resources including text, graphics, audio and video data, etc. |
Return to the Internet Fundamentals Page| Last Revised: 13 January 2004 | © 2004 Randolph U. Gibson |
| www.gibson.vero-beach.fl.us/classes/internet/services.html | E-mail: rgibson@ircc.edu |