where email-address is the person's e-mail address. You'll get back a display that shows the last time the person was online, whether they've gotten any new mail since that time and what, if anything, is in their .plan file. Some people and institutions have come up with creative uses for these .plan files, letting you do everything from checking the weather in Massachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings. Try fingering these e-mail addresses:
weather@cirrus.mit.edu Latest National Weather Service weather
forecasts for regions in Massachusetts.
quake@geophys.washington.edu Locations and magnitudes of recent
earthquakes around the world.
jtchern@ocf.berkeley.edu Current major-league baseball standings and
results of the previous day's games.
nasanews@space.mit.edu The day's events at NASA.
coke@cs.cmu.edu See how many cans of each type of soda are left in a particular soda machine in the computer-science department of Carnegie-Mellon University.
6.6 FINDING SOMEONE ON THE NET
So you have a friend and you want to find out if he has an Internet account to which you can write? The quickest way may be to just pick up the phone, call him and ask him. Although there are a variety of "white pages" services available on the Internet, they are far from complete — college students, users of commercial services such as CompuServe and many Internet public-access sites, and many others simply won't be listed. Major e-mail providers are working on a universal directory system, but that could be some time away. In the meantime, a couple of "white pages" services might give you some leads, or even just entertain you as you look up famous people or long-lost acquaintances. The whois directory provides names, e-mail and postal mail address and often phone numbers for people listed in it. To use it, telnet to
internic.net
No log-on is needed. The quickest way to use it is to type