Internet Tutorial
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.
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..
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.
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.
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