INTERNET SERVICES

E-Mail: Electronic Mail - This means a user can send messages, electronically to individual or group of individuals. However, Mail doesn't mean just messages, but it can be a text file, pictures, programs, announcements, magazines and soon. For many user E-Mail is first real exposure to, and use of internet.

WEB: Web is a large system of servers which offers all kinds of information to anyone on the NET. Information can be in any form of text, pictures, sounds etc. To access this information a program called browser is used, very common Web is called WWW.

World Wide Web, WWW provides an easy & interactive way to access a variety of media. There are two reasons why it so popular:

Within the WEB information are stored in pages. (This has no connection with page.) About each page holds information & links to other pages. The operation on WEB relies mainly on hypertext. Hypertext is as such a regular text, it can be written, read, searched edited. Hypertext contains connections within text to other documents. The hypertext links are called hyperlinks.

Hypermedia is advanced version of hypertext as it contains links not only to other pieces of text but also to other forms of media such as sounds, images, movies etc. Hypermedia contains hypertext, and multimedia.

Documents on WWW are written in HTML called Hyper text Mark Language. HTML defines structural elements of documents such as headers, citations, addresses etc.

Usenet: Usenet is a system of discussion groups in which individual articles are distributed throughout the world. More commonly called Bulletin Board Service (BBS) of Internet. Just about any topic you can think of is discussed in some UseNet. Usenet is read and contributed to, on daily basis by millions of people. To participate in Usenet, user uses a client program called newsreader. Using newsreader one can read articles, save articles to file, respond to an article, send in an article etc.

Gopher: Gopher displays a set of resources on the internet in form of MENUS or list of items. Each gopher server has a main menu and a series of sub menus. To use a gopher all one needs is to select a menu item, and client will fetch it for him. Menu items can point to a number of different types of resources -files, pictures, other internet resources and so on.

The totality of all the information available via this system is called gopherspace. Gophers are simple to use, fast and ubiquitous. Moreover they are high quality based and don't require a graphical user interface. This service is provided by following major on-line services, (i) Internee SLIP or PPP account (ii) Shell Account (iii) CompuServe (iv) MSN

Veronica: This is one of tool of Gopher. To help find things in gopherspace one can use veronica. Veronica performs search based on certain keywords, veronica builds a special gopher menu for all the menu items for which search has been made.

FTP: FTP service called file transfer protocol allows copying files from one computer to other. Copying can be done only if one has account on both computers which are on Internet. This service is very handy for people with account on more than one computer. Many Internet sites have files of public interest. These are available as shareware and can be copied without using passwd etc. There are called anonymous ftp. Anonymous ftp is very powerful & important internet service one can find electronic magazines, archives of UseNet discussion, groups, technical documentation & much more.

ARCHIE: Rule of Archie is to make the whole system manageable by helping you to find what you need. Archie searches for all files that matter particular criterion and then anonymous ftp can be used to copy them. The name Archie was chosen to express the idea of an archive server.

TELNET: The service allowing to login and use a Remote Computer is called Telnet. To utilize this service one uses a telnet client to make the connection and they provide the services of a terminal. Thus using a Telnet is like using a special need, one will probably never have an account on a remote computer As a public service many internet hosts are set up to allow anybody to use a special guest account with restricted privileges.

WAIS: (Wide Area Information Server) this maintains separate indexes of the contents of selected documents. These indexes are like the indexes available at the back of book. User can choose any index and WAIS responds by providing a list of documents in that index. Wais also allows reading those documents. It is a full text search system.

PING: PING is a program that checks to see whether we can communicate with another computer on the internet. It sends a short message to which the other computer automatically responds.

Finger: One of the most useful commands where someone receives mail is finger. Finger is a program that displays information about someone on Net. In most Unix systems, the command tells us on right now on most internet hosts. It tells us, person's maximum information depending on his address (Internet).

IRC: Internet Relay Chat is a system that enables uses at other internet folks to talk to each other in real time mode. It is a party line over which you can have more interesting conversations with other users all over the place at the same time.

Talk facilities: This allows one to communicate with other people on NET in real time, either by typing of messages back & forth or by actual voice conversation. One can talk to one person in total privacy or can have a group discussion in private or can have public conversations. A new facility called IRC (Internet Relay Chart) is also available. Each IRC Conversation is carried on a channel. IRC is used by a great many people around the world.