What Color is Your Surfboard?

by Danny Faught

What kind of surfboard do you use to surf the net? There are several different kinds of media you can use to communicate on the Internet, and each is useful in different ways.

One of my favorite ways to communicate on the Internet is Usenet. Actually, you don't have to be on the Internet to take advantage of Usenet, but most people do connect to Usenet via the Internet. Usenet consists of thousands of hierarchically organized "newsgroups", each covering a particular topic. For example, in my last article I mentioned comp.unix.questions, which is for general questions about Unix. Usenet is used for public announcements and group discussions. Some groups have many thousands of participants, though most people listen in silently without adding to the discussion.

Another very popular communication medium on the Internet is electronic mail (email). Email is often used for private communication between two people, though you have to take extra precautions if what you're saying is really private. But you can also hold small group discussions by sending email to several people at once, and you can even reach very large groups by participating in a mailing list which sends your mail on to hundreds of people. These large mailing lists are similar in spirit to newsgroups, and they sometimes evolve into newsgroups when they get enough participation. Usenet is a much more efficient mechanism for the largest groups.

Usenet and email are not as interactive as media such as talk, IRC, and Internet telephone and videoconferencing. Talk is a Unix utility that has been around for a long time. You can call someone's account using talk, and if they answer by also running talk, you can type at each other in realtime on a split screen. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat. It's similar to talk, except that an IRC channel allows many people across the world to "talk" at the same time via their keyboards. Recently, programs have appeared which transfer audio rather than text, allowing you to use the Internet as a free long-distance telephone service. And there is at least one experimental Internet site which is trying videoconferencing.

Another set of tools that works interactively is telnet and rlogin. Both of the tools allow you to connect to a remote machine and use it as if you were logged in to a terminal on that machine. The telnet protocol is often used to provide other interactive services, such as on-line library card catalogs.

The last category of media I'll discuss is those which make files and information available on demand. It includes ftp, gopher, and the World Wide Web. Ftp stands for "file transfer protocol". Ftp allows you to look at a file listing on a remote machine and copy them to your local machine. Some machines allow anonymous ftp access, which means you don't need an account on the remote machine to access files. There are millions of files available worldwide via anonymous ftp. Gopher is a menu-driven protocol for reading text files, and it can also provide other services such as telnet connections to remote machines and seamless connections to other gopher servers. One common use of gopher is universities that provide information about their campus via a gopher server. But new gopher servers aren't likely to show up now that the World Wide Web is growing like wildfire.

The web can provide everything gopher does and much more. One obvious benefit of the web is that it provides graphics as well as text. And both graphics and text can have hyperlinks to any other area of the web, which is more flexible than gopher's menu system. Web browsers try to provide one-stop shopping for your all your information browsing by supporting many protocols besides the html protocol used for hypertext web browsing. Other protocols include ftp, gopher, telnet, and viewing local files. I actually like the ftp and gopher interfaces in web browsers better than the original text-based interfaces, at least when they work. With some custom programming on a web server, practically any type of service can be offered on the web, and this can really make it seem like the entire Internet is on the web. Web browsers also attempt to be newsreaders and email agents, but the ones I've seen are very poorly designed and I recommend avoiding them.

Now let's apply some of this knowledge. Though there is some overlap between the different media, there are some tasks that work better on some than others. For example, Usenet newsgroups often have a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) file which provides the ground rules for the newsgroup and answers to the most common questions that get asked. These files are re-posted to the newsgroup on a periodic basis, but some news servers expire articles within only a few days, and posting the FAQ so often that it's always available would mean everyone would constantly receive the FAQ over and over. There are a number of mechanisms in place to work around this, but the real problem is that Usenet wasn't designed to handle this sort of situation. You'll now find that many FAQs are available on World Wide Web servers, which is a nice medium for making information always available. You'll often run into situations like this where a variety of Internet services are used to make a total solution.

For more information, the alt.internet.media-coverage FAQ gives a basic though sometimes vague overview of the Internet. A few other references for things I mentioned above are:

World Wide Web - http://www.boutell.com/faq/
Usenet - ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/usenet/welcome/part1
Email etiquette - http://sunsite.bilkent.edu.tr/pub/mail/pegasus/FAQs/etiquet.txt
IRC - http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/altircfaq.html
Internet telephone - http://rpcp.mit.edu/~asears/voice-faq.html (obsolete link)
gopher - gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu:70/11/Information%20About%20Gopher (obsolete link)