Internet Tools Summary

Internet Tools Summary

John December (decemj@rpi.edu)

01 Dec 93; Release 1.30

Copyright © 1993 by John December (decemj@rpi.edu). Permission to use for non-commercial, educational purposes. This copyright and permission notice must appear in all copies. Permission is also granted to mention, cite, refer to, or describe this document in commercial books, products, or online services (but not to reproduce in whole or in part without permission.)

Provided "as is" without expressed or implied warranty. I make no representations about this document's suitability, accuracy, or stability.

PURPOSE
The purpose of this document is to list tools available on the Internet that are used for network information retrieval (NIR), Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), or other services. This is not meant to be a strict categorization or an exhaustive list, rather a reference catalog. I certainly would welcome comments and suggestions.
AUDIENCE
those getting started in understanding what you can do on the Internet in NIR and CMC; for those experienced, it collects and summarizes sources of information.
ASSUMPTION
you have access to and know how to use finger, ftp, gopher, http, telnet, email, or Usenet newsgroups.
REFERENCES
The references listed at the end of this document are very useful guides to these tools.
ACTION
The Action: field of the entries is described in the section at the end of this document, ACTION NOTATION. This is a notation that I've devised to try to characterize the tools further; I'm not quite satisfied with this notation, though, yet.
NOTES
  1. Respect your access privileges to these tools.
  2. This information changes; Additions/comments welcome.
  3. For demo purposes, I have used Unix commands; certainly Unix is not the only operating system required for these tools and forums. Apologies to those who don't have Unix.
  4. On the classification (NIR v. CMC): some tools could be used for either, such as telnet and email. I've placed them in what I feel are "principle use" categories, e.g., telnet is used mostly for NIR, and email is commonly used for CMC (although both have applications in the other category).

Contents

Information about updates to or different formats of this document:

NETWORK INFORMATION RETRIEVAL (NIR) TOOLS

Alex

Archie

Astra

Biomix

Cello

Compass

Essence

Finger

File Transfer Protocol (Ftp)

Gopher

Hyper-G

Hytelnet

Jughead

Knowbot

Moo Gopher

Mosaic for X/DOS/Mac

Netfind

Netserv

Nslookup

Ping

Prospero

Soft Pages

Telnet

Veronica

Wide Area Information Server (WAIS)

WHOIS

World Wide Web (WWW)

X.500

COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION (CMC) FORUMS

Email

Interactive Webbing (IW)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Internet Talk Radio (ITR)

LISTSERV

Mbone

Multiple-User Dialogue (MUD)

Talk

USENET

REFERENCES

ACTION NOTATION

 
NOTATION: In order to summarize the action of these network tools, 
I've developed a notation to express the essential information/ 
communication action of each of the tools. 
                      
NOUNS                 
C Client              
F File(s)             
H Host/computer       
I Interface           
G Graphical User Interface 
L List                
M Message(s)          
R Receiver            
S Server              
U User/sender         
                      
VERBS                 
:= has read access only 
== has read and write access 
:: interacts with user interface (synchronous) 
(()) sound in interface 
* video interface     
<- copys (over network) from 
<-> copys (over network) to and from 
<+ linked from        
<= created by         
[] contains           
() consists of        
                      
CONJUNCTIONS          
; and                 
                      
NOUN PHRASES          
S[F] Server containing file(s) 
M(L) Message consisting of a List 
S[U] Server containing users(s) = other users using this server 
H[U] Host containing users(s) = other users logged into this host 
                      
NOTATION EXAMPLES:    
File Transfer Protocol: U == F <- H[F] 
Narration: The user gets read/write access to a copy of a 
file that was copied over the network from a 
host containing that file. 
                      
Electronic mail: R == M <- H[M <= U] 
Narration: The Receiver gets read/write access to a copy of 
the Message that was copied over the network from 
an (originating) Host on which resides the original 
Message created by the User (Sender).