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7.1: The Internet and Web pages 7.1.1: What is the Internet? 7.1.2: What is WWW, Mosaic, and URLs? 7.1.3: What pages would be of interest to me? 7.2: Usenet News 7.2.1: What is News? 7.2.2: How can I get access to News? 7.2.3: What newsgroups would be of interest to me? 7.3: FTP Sites 7.3.1: What is FTP? 7.3.2: How do I use FTP? 7.3.3: What sites would be of interest to me? 7.3.4: What does the *.gz, *.zip, *.tar extension mean?The Internet is a network of networks with no central control which consists simply a set of specifications that a system must conform to to send data to other sites. There is no physical object that can be accurately called 'The Internet'.
WWW stands for "World Wide Web", sometimes called "WWW", "W3", or just "the Web". WWW is the result of a network project in distributed hypermedia systems started by CERN in the late '80s and has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. WWW stores information in documents called "pages"; a page usually contains a single document containing hypertext and images. Hypertext is text with pointers to other text, which allow users to jump from text to text based on references they want to follow. Since every WWW page usually connects to dozens of other pages via hypertext links, the entire network forms a humongous "web" of information pages that stretches all over the world.
WWW pages are accessed using a "browser", like Mosaic, Netscape or Internet Explorer. A browser is a program that can read pages, follow hypertext links to other pages, and download information referenced in pages upon command. Mosaic was the first browser available, and was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA),located at the University of Illinois in 1993. As of today, the popular choice of browsers are Netscape Navigator, available for almost all platforms at http://www,netscape.com and MS Internet Explorer for the Windows and MacOS platforms at http://www.microsoft.com
Browsers access pages using a URL, or "Uniform Resource Locator", which is a network address pointing to the desired page. In order to view a page, you need to know the URL of the page you are looking for. A typical URL looks like:
http://www.somewhere.edu/a_directory/file.html
_http_ [Hyper Text Transfer Protocol] is the method to access the file, _www.somewhere.edu_ is the name of the site that has the page you ar elooking for and _a_directory_ is the directoy path to the file you want.
For more information on WWW, check out the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which is the main reference site for HTML and its succesors.
The following URLs point to pages that may be of interest to Robotech fans:
The ROBOTECH.COM pageUSEnet is not the same thing as Internet, however many users access USEnet groups via the Internet. Again, there is no central 'USEnet authority', simply a set of rules and technical specifications to be followed. USEnet news allows for public discussion around the world by allowing users to 'post' their comments to be read, and commented on, by others.
USEnet is a standard part of nearly any ISP account so this is should not be problem. If your current site doesn't carry it, or has a poor interface, there are *many* commercial or free sites that do.
Lastly there are some sites that allow users to read news. Howeber, it is difficult to browse for news, and it so not refresh very quickly the new posts
For the Robotech Fans with USEnet access:
For the Robotech Fans without USEnet access, it is possible for them to access news through http://groups.google.com
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, it is a system that allows you to grab files from special sites. There are FTP sites for all kinds of topics, and several for anime alone.
Once you have an address for an FTP site, for example 130.215.24.1 /anime, you can FTP to that site. There aeveral programs (including browsers) that can do ftp that are reasonablly straightforward to use. It is better to use a FTP client as browsers have a lot of overhead which can result in sites with large directories to take a long time to display
The following FTP sites may be of interest to Robotech and Anime fans:
ftp://ftp.cs.ubc.ca/pub/archive/anime-fan-works/Robotech/
Robotech fanfiction
ftp://ftp.csua.berkeley.edu/pub/palladium/contrib
Robotech RPG Stuff
ftp://ftp.io.com/pub/usr/deitrich
Robotech RPG Stuff
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/tv+movies/anime-manga/sorted/
General Anime sortedStuff
.gz stands for GNU Zip (abbreviated "gzip"), a compression algorithm developed by the Free Software Foundation in Cambridge, MA. Gzip can be used by Unix, MS-DOS, VMS, and Macintosh computers (as well as other platforms). If you want one utility to decompress gzip and as well as any other format you may reasoanblly run into try http://www.gnu.org/software/gzip/gzip.html it has versions for several platforms, including MacOS,Windows, and Unix
.zip was developed by Compuserver (???), and as gzip, is a compression algorithm. The most popular utilities for zip, can be found at Winzip or PKWare both sites provide evaluation and comercial versions of these tools, though GNU Zip, handles zip files, too.
.tar stands for Tape Archive, and initially they were used to store files on magnetic tape. Today, Tar can be redirect its output to available devices, such files or other devices (with the use of pipes. If you want an utility for tar, try http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/tar.html there are versions for several tipes of platforms, including Windows and MacOS
