SIMTEL20
(simtel20.army.mil or 192.88.110.20) at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico contains a similar archive software for MS-DOS computers.
An FTP visit to the Network Service Center at nnsc.nsf.net (128.89.1.178) is a gold mine of documents and training materials on net use. See further information on this in the "Resources for Learning More" section of this article.
Project Gutenberg
The primary goal of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and distribution of electronic text. They hope to get ten thousand titles to one hundred million users for a trillion etexts in distribution by the end of 2001.
Some of the many texts available now include Alice in Wonderland,
Peter Pan, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost and other texts in the public domain.
Many of these texts are availablevia ftp:
ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (128.174.201.12)
cd etext/etext92 [for 1992 releases] [etext93 is available for testing now] cd etext/etext91 [for 1991 releases] [This file should be in it] cd etext/articles [for Project Gutenberg articles and newsletters]. Most are also available from quake.think.com (192.31.181.1); /pub/etext, from simtel20, and from many other sites.
For more info try Gopher as in the following section or contact:
Michael S. Hart, Director
Project Gutenberg
National Clearinghouse for Machine Readable Texts
Illinois Benedictine College
5700 College Road
Lisle, Illinois 60532-0900
INTERNET: dircompg@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
CompuServe: >INTERNET:dircompg@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Attmail: internet!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!dircompg
BITNET: HART@UIUCVMD
Travel Agents:
Archie, Gopher, Veronica, WAIS, Worldwide Web and More
There is so much information on the net, it's impossible to know where everything is, or even how to begin looking. Fortunately, some computerized "agents" are in development to help sort through the massive data libraries on the net.
Archie
Peter Deutsch, of McGill's Computing Centre, describes the archie server concept, which allows users to ask a question once yet search many different hosts for files of interest.
"The archie service is a collection of resource discovery tools that together provide an electronic directory service for locating information in an Internet environment. Originally created to track the contents of anonymous ftp archive sites, the archie service is now being expanded to include a variety of other online directories and resource listings."
"Currently, archie tracks the contents of over 800 anonymous FTP archive sites containing some 1,000,000 files throughout the Internet. Collectively, these files represent well over 50 Gigabytes (50,000,000,000 bytes) of information, with additional information being added daily. Anonymous ftp archive sites offer software, data and other information which can be copied and used without charge by anyone with connection to the Internet."
"The archie server automatically updates the listing information from each site about once a month, ensuring users that the information they receive is reasonably timely, without imposing an undue load on the archive sites or network bandwidth."
Unfortunately the archie server at McGill is currently out of service. Other sites are: archie.ans.net (USA [NY]) archie.rutgers.edu (USA [NJ]) archie.sura.net (USA [MD]) archie.funet.fi (Finland/Mainland Europe) archie.au (Australia/New Zealand) archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (Great Britain/Ireland)
More information avaiable from: UNIX Support Group Computing Centre McGill University Room 200 Burnside Hall 805 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, Quebec CANADA H3A 2K6 514/398-3709 peterd@cc.mcgill.ca
Internet Gopher
Gopher (or go-fer): someone who fetches necessary items from many locations.
Login as gopher after you telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy having a computer do all the work for you. Almost. Gopher is still in experimental mode at many gopherized sites. Still, it is one of the best ways to locate information on and in the Internet.
Besides archie, the gopher at consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and games, humor, libraries (including reference books such as the Hacker's Dictionary, Roget's 1911 Thesaurus, and the CIA World Fact Book), gateways to other US and foreign gophers, news, and gateways to other systems.
VERONICA: Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives.
Very new on the scene is VERONICA.
Here is some information from Steve Foster about it.
"Veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menus in the entire gopher web. As Archie is to ftp archives, Veronica is to gopherspace. Unlike Archie, the search results can connect you directly to the data source. Imagine an Archie search that lets you select the data, not just the host sites, directly from a menu. Because Veronica is accessed through a gopher client, it is easy to use, and gives access to all types of data supported by the gopher protocol."
"Veronica was designed as a response to the problem of resource discovery in the rapidly-expanding gopher web. Frustrated comments in the net news- groups have recently reflected the need for such a service. Additional motivation came from the comments of naive gopher users, several of whom assumed that a simple-touse service would provide a means to find resources `without having to know where they are.'"
"The result of a Veronica search is an automatically-generated gopher menu, customized according to the user's keyword specification. Items on this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers. These are functional gopher items, immediately accessible via the gopher client just double- click to open directories, read files, or perform other searches — across hundreds of gopher servers. You need never know which server is actually involved in filling your request for information. Items that are appear particularly interesting can be saved in the user's bookmark list."
"Notice that these are NOT full-text searches of data at gopher-server sites, just as Archie does not index the contents of ftp sites, but only the names of files at those sites. Veronica indexes the TITLES on all levels of the menus, for most gopher sites in the Internet. 258 gophers are indexed by Veronica on Nov. 17, 1992; we have discovered over 500 servers and will index the full set in the near future. We hope that Veronica will encourage gopher administrators to use very descriptive titles on their menus."
"To try Veronica, select it from the `Other Gophers' menu on Minnesota's
gopher server (consultant.micro.umn.edu), or point your gopher at:
Name=Veronica (search menu items in most of GopherSpace)
Type=1
Port=70
Path=1/Veronica Host=futique.scs.unr.edu"
"Veronica is an experimental service, developed by Steve Foster and Fred Barrie at University of Nevada. As we expect that the load will soon outgrow our hardware, we will distribute the Veronica service across other sites in the near future."
"Please address comments to: gophadm@futique.scs.unr.edu"
Is this the new world order of automated librarianship?