Operated by the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., this automated data service provides database access to information ranging from current navigational satellite positioning, astronomical data, and software utilities. A wide variety of databases can be searched and instructions for file transfer are given. Telnet to tycho.usno.navy.mil and log in as ads.
"My consciousness suddenly switched locations, for the first time in my life, from the vicinity of my head and body to a point about twenty feet away from where I normally see the world." Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality p255
————————- Various Tools
New and interesting ways to use the Internet are being dreamed up every day. As they gain wide-spread use, some methods become near-standard (or actual written standard) tools for Internet users to take advantage of. A few are detailed here; there are undoubtedly others, and new ideas spring up all the time. An active user of the Internet will discover most of the more common ones in time. Usually, these services are free. Commercial Services for applications that are commercially available over the Internet.
Usenet is often used to announce a new service or capability on the Internet. In particular, the groups comp.archives and comp.protocols.tcp-ip are good places to look. Information will drift into other areas as word spreads. Usenet News for information on reading news.
Finger
On many systems there exists the finger command, which yield information about each user that's currently logged in. This command also has extensions for use over the Internet, as well. Under normal circumstances, the command is simply finger for a summary of who's logged into the local system, or finger username for specific information about a user. It's also possible to go one step further and go onto the network. The general usage is
finger @hostname
To see who's currently logged in at Widener University, for instance, use
% finger @cs.widener.edu [cs.widener.edu] Login Name TTY Idle When Where brendan Brendan Kehoe p0 Fri 02:14 tattoo.cs.widene sven Sven Heinicke p1 Fri 04:16 xyplex3.cs.widen