Internet Tutorial


Computing!




Welcome to the future! Zeuter Development Corporation is happy to bring to you fast and economical access to the Internet with full access to the World Wide Web, E-mail, Online Chat, FTP, News Groups, and available web-page posting.
The following tutorial is meant as a general overview of the Internet and the World Wide Web, for detailed explanations and tutorials, refer to the computer section in a bookstore or your local library for many books devoted to the subject.

What is the Internet?

The Internet, put simply, is just a lot of computers from around the world connected together, and each time you connect to the Internet you connect to this network, allowing you to send and receive information from any other computer connected to the Internet. Each of these computers on the Internet can be anywhere, from Australia to Russia, and it makes no difference to you, a user, where they are located.

The Internet is the backbone upon which the World Wide Web, FTP, Email, etc travels on. Each computer on the Internet has an address called an IP address, or Internet Protocol address, by which any other computer in the world can find that computer and communicate with it. Every time you dial into Zeuter Development Corporation you receive an IP address, so that you can communicate with other computers and they can communicate with you.

Since this IP address is long and hard to remember (it is hard to remember 204.41.167.57 but easier to remember www.yahoo.com) the designers of the Internet have come up with a system known as DNS. DNS is rather complex, but all that you have to know about it is that when you type in http://www.lotus.com your computer will contact the DNS server and get the IP address corresponding to www.lotus.com. All this is done so that we would not have to remember cryptic numbers, but rather descriptive names. Some computers, such as yours, will not have a DNS name, so if someone wanted to contact you they would have to use the IP address to get in touch with you..

What is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a concept that allows for a distributed hypermedia system. What exactly does that mean? Well, it means that you can send and receive multimedia documents (web pages) from anywhere and to anywhere. These pages can be as simple as plain text or as complex as animated graphics with sound and music. The WWW uses the Internet as the medium to transfer these pages, and is just one of the many things that make use of the Internet, though it is the greatest user of the Internet. The front end to the WWW is a browser such as Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mosaic, or one of the many others; it is a browser such as these which allows you to find and display the information from other computers without having to learn the complex and difficult language of how the WWW communicates.

How do I use the WWW?

First, lets give you a basic understanding of the WWW. The basic of the WWW is HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML operates by means of a series of codes placed throughout a text document, which are translated by a WWW client, such as Netscape Navigator, into specific kinds of formatting and on which (in some cases) the user can act upon. These codes include links, images, text attributes such as bold or italic, forms, maps, and others. It is these codes which the browser interprets which allows a link to be shown as highlighted, a graphic to be displayed as the image it represents, a list as a series of bullets. Without HTML, the WWW would be nothing.

The WWW communicates by means of a protocol called HTTP, which stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. This protocol is what you type at first in the location field of your browser to connect to a WWW server on the Internet. For example, to connect to IBM's site on the Internet, you would type in:
http://www.ibm.com.
HTTP is just one protocol that the Internet uses, refer to the last page of this tutorial to see a list and description of the variety of protocols available.

Now to use the WWW. Go online and open up your WWW client (probably Netscape Navigator) and lets get started!

The WWW is a very large place, and it has no starting point! For the first time user, the fact that you can go anywhere is amazing, but trying to find out where to go can be very frustrating. First, lets take a tour of the interesting things on the web, then we will go to some WWW sites that help us find information on the web.

In your browser, at the location field or Document URL field, type in:

http://www.netboy.com
This will bring you to an online comic strip called netboy, a recent phenomenon of the web which has attracted much attention for its originality and ideas. You can look at the comic for the day, previous comics, or order netboy merchandise if you feel up to it. But before you whip out that credit card, let's jump to another site and show you more of what is available on the Internet.

http://www.nasa.gov
If you have ever had any interest in outer space, the space shuttle, or probes to other planets, this is the site to start from. From here you can get pictures of planets and stars, information on the current or upcoming space shuttle mission, answers to those questions that your children always seem to ask about space, and many other interesting things. Spend some time here, then jump to:

http://www.elibrary.com
Elibrary, or Electric Library, is a novel concept that is just beginning to be explored. Even though this is a pay - for - service site, they do allow you a test drive to see if you wish to subscribe. Try the trial search for something, and you might be surprised to find out how much information they can search through. Sites like these are extremely useful for students trying to find information. From here lets go to a completely different type of WWW site at:

http://www..kultur98.stockholm
Stockholm, Sweden has been named the European culture capital for 1998, and this site is a good basis for researching a real world trip. Take a look around this beautiful city then jump to:

http://www.popularmechanics.com
This last stop on our brief tour shows just how much the WWW is becoming a part of the media. At this site you can get a lot of the articles that you would normally pay for at the newsstand, plus information on many makes and models of cars and trucks. Many magazines now have online versions, some with additional articles only available online.

Now that we have gone to a variety of sites, you might wonder how you could ever find something on the WWW? Well, the answer is using a search engine. A search engine is a site that has a huge database of descriptions of other sites on the web, and allows you to type in what you want to find and will return the name and link and most of the time a short description of sites that it has in its database that it believes matches your search. This might sound rather complex, but in fact it is rather quite easy. Just type in the name of one of the popular search engines below and type enter.

http://www.yahoo.com
http://www.altavista.com
http://www.webcrawler.com
http://index.opentext.com
http://www.lycos.com
http://www.infoseek.com

These sites tend to be busy and sometimes can be rather slow, just try another if one is too busy. Among the advertisements and graphics is a field that allows you to type in a word or words (each search engine differs with respect to boolean AND and OR searches, consult the help information usually present for multi-word searches. A hint : usually, but not always, a space means and.
E.g. Jack Jill would usually be interpreted as Jack and Jill.)

Enter something to search for, such as Parry Sound, press enter and the search engine will return all the sites it knows of that have something in them relating to Parry Sound. Sometimes one search engine will not have much on a certain subject, just try another because it is most likely out there somewhere!

Other things on the Internet - E-mail

E-mail is one of the great blessing of the Internet, at very low cost one can send messages to anyone else on the Internet and know it will be received in a matter of minutes. E-mail is quick and effective, but like most of the Internet, it is not secure, which means that someone with sufficent knowhow can read your mail or pretend to be you. However, the risk is small unless you have very determined enemies, and the benefits are great. Open up the E-mail client Eudora or any E-mail client (Netscape Navigator has one built in - click on Window - Netscape Mail.) and lets get started. The following explanation assumes you are using Eudora.

A good way to familiarize yourself with e-mail is to send a message to yourself. From the Message menu select New Message. A new window will pop up with a blinking cursor at the start of the To: field. Type your e-mail address in this field. Notice that the From: field has been automatically filled in with your return address and cannot be altered. Press the TAB key till the cursor is blinking in the Subject: field. Enter a subject such as Test Message. Move the cursor past the fields Cc: and Bcc: and Attachments: to the message area. This is where you will actually type in your message. Enter some text such as This is a test message.

Now to send your message, just click on the send button in the upper right hand corner of the composition window.. The composition window will immediately close and a progress window will be displayed as your message is sent to the E-mail server.

Now to check to see if you have received the mail which you have sent. From the File menu, choose Check Mail. Eudora will ask you for your password, type it in and press OK. Eudora will now log into the mail server and see if you have any mail. If so, it will retrieve it to your computer The In mailbox window will be displayed if you have mail, and the message that you sent should be listed there. Double-click on the message that you sent to display its contents. When done , double-click on the close box on the upper left hand corner of the messge window.

To reply to a message, select the message by clicking once on it, from the Message menu, select Reply. A new composition window will be displayed with the sender's address automatically entered in the To: field. The original messge will be included in the body of the messge and can be modified as needed. Just enter more text below and send the message.

Wow, wasn't that simple! E-mail is so easy to send that sometimes we forget that even though the message arrives almost immediately, the person receiving the message might not check their mail very often, and we might think our mail got lost! Just be patient, if the mail did not get received, it will be returned to you. (This is often the case when the address is typed incorrectly in the To: field).

Other things on the Internet - FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is how files are normally sent over the Internet. When you retrieve a file such as a new game or an update for your wordprocessor, you use this protocol to do it. We will use WS-FTP , which is a ftp client to download some software.

Open up WS-FTP, and you will be presented with a screen allowing you to choose from a number of FTP sites. In the Profile Name field, find the Microsoft entry, make sure the Anonymous Login check box is checked, and press OK. This will take you to the Microsoft FTP Site at ftp://ftp.microsoft.com. This site has just about everything dealing with Microsoft Windows, we will go and download a game called Fury3.

Before going on, click on the ChrDir button in the Local System window, then type in the popup field c:\temp and press Ok.. This will move you to the temp directory on your harddrive if it exists, if it doesn t, type in a directory that you want things downloaded to.

In the remote system window, you should see a folder called deskapps, double click on this to bring you to the desktop applications folder. In this folder you should see a folder called games, double click on this to go to the games folder. You should now see 3 folders and a readme.txt file. Double click on the public folder, then on the Fury3 folder. You are now in the Fury3 folder, which should have 3 files :

ATIDRIVE.ZIP
FURY3X.ZIP
Readme.txt
Double click on the Readme.txt file, which will open a download window and download it to your hard drive. It will now show up under the local system window. Click on it to highlight it, then press the View button. This will open up a Notepad window displaying the contents of the readme file. Read it, then close this window.

If you have the time and wish to have the game (it takes a while to download) double click on the FURY3X.ZIP file, and WS_FTP will start downloading the program to your local harddrive. A Transfer Status window will open up, displaying how far along the transfer is coming. You can cancel at any time by pressing the Cancel button in the bottom right corner of this window.

When the file is downloaded, close WS_FTP by pressing the exit button in the bottom right corner of the main window, and your FTP session is now over. Congratulations!! To use the program, you will need a unzipping program which, if you do not have, can be found by searching at

http://www.shareware.com

for winzip. This will bring you to a window allowing you to choose from a couple of versions,. click on the version appropriate for your operating system, which will bring you to a page telling you where you can download the file. Scroll down and choose a site from Canada or the USA rather than a foreign site because it is faster. Choose to Save File in the popup window in Netscape, choose a directory to store it, then press OK.

Once the download is complete (this was actually a FTP download, but Netscape hid that from you, and it is slower than a FTP transfer in WS_FTP) close Netscape, then run the setup program to set up Winzip, then run the Winzip program to expand the Fury3x.zip archive (another name for a compressed program). Now you are able to set up and run Fury3, enjoy!!

Other Things on the Internet - Newsgroups

Newsgroups are one of the greatest things about the Web, and possibly one of the worst. There are many thousands of them, dealing with subjects as diverse as the Simpons TV show to computer languages to Canadian job opportunities. These newsgroups are extremely easy to use, however one should use caution in using them appropriately, there are guides for using newsgroups in general and most newsgroups have a specific code of conduct . Also, there are many newsgroups that deal with what some, such as myself, would deem as obscene. One must observe caution when allowing children access to newsgroups because of the inappropriate nature of some newsgroups.

Open up Netscape Navigator, and click on the window menu item, then on Netscape News. A new window will pop up, with 3 panes. The upper left pane will (depending on whether someone has used it before) will have a folder usually called news with 3 item descending from it:

news.announce.newusers
news.newusers.questions
news.answers

Beside these newsgroups are a checkbox and a number, the checkbox, when checked means that you are subscribed to the newsgroup and it will show up it the list everytime you open the Netscape news reader. The number beside the checkbox shows how many unread messages are currently in that newsgroup; as you can see, some have just a few messages, while others have many messages. Click on news.answers and the program will get some messages from the news server. The messages will show up in the upper right pane, usually around 100 at a time. Messages that are indented are messages that are threaded, which means that the author(s) have grouped them together because they deal with the same or very similar subjects. Click on a message, and it will show up in the bottom pane. The message will consist of a bunch of headers naming the subject, the date, who it is from, and other information, and the message body. Look at a message, then choose a message that you might wish to reply to, and from the message menu item choose post reply.

A new window will open up which is very similar to an e-mail window in Eudora. The fields at the top will list the newsgroup to reply to, the subject with a Re: at the beginning signifying that it is a reply to a previous message, and the message being replied to will be copied into the message body with > in front of each line. These lines can be edited, deleted, etc. to suit your needs, people usually shorten them to just the pertinent passages so as not to make the reply laborously long. Type in a reply, then press the Send button (if you do not wish to do this, which I recommend not doing at first anyway, just cancel by going to the File menu item and clicking on close. A box will come up asking if you wish to discard your changes, click on Yes to exit back to the main news window.

Now, lets add a new newsgroup to your list. From the Options menu item choose Show all Newsgroups. This will take a while, but will download all available newsgroups from the server. Once it is done, scroll through the list and check the checkbox beside any newsgroups that you want to subscribe to. The list is very long, so don t expect to see every newsgroup in this short trip!!

The following is a short list of main newsgroups and what they stand for:

alt. - alternate
comp. - computers
rec. - recreation
sci. - science
soc. - social
Well, that just about rounds out this tutorial. We hope that this has given you a basic understanding of what the Internet has to offer and what you can give to it, happy surfing!!




The following has been included to help you get accustomed to some of the programs that you will be using, we hope that they will be beneficial to you.

Internet Protocols



ftp:// (File Transfer Protocol) This protocol is used for transferring files from one computer to another.
e.g. ftp://ftp.netscape.com

http:// (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) This is the protocol for the World Wide Web, and in most browsers you do not have to type this in because it is the assumed protocol.
e.g. www.shareware.com or http://www.shareware.com

news:// (Newsgroups) This is the protocol for connecting to a news server and accessing newsgroups.
e.g. news://news

mailto: (Mail) This is the Internet protocol for transferring e-mail. This protocol does not need the // that the other protocols do.
e.g. mailto:webmaster@ibm.com

gopher:// Gopher is a type of directory service that is available on the Internet, all browsers support this command.
e.g. gopher://someplace.com

file: File is how browsers can access information stored locally on your computer, if the file is followed by ///c| this indicates that the file is located on your local C:\ drive, otherwise it works like ftp:.
e.g. file:///c|netscape/stuff/home.htm

telnet:// Telnet stands for Tele-Networking, which means running a remote terminal over a network. Most browsers don't support this themselves, but rather they will usually launch another telnet client when such links are requested.
e.g.: telnet://telnet.somewhere.com

wais:// Wide Area Information Search is a protocol for accessing special servers that will do searches for you. This protocol is becoming less well used as web-based search engines become very commonplace.
e.g. wais://someserver.com



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