An Internet Talk
Aims - Everything I say is online, so you needn't make notes. I'll avoid technical details, and I won't be talking very much about engineering. Free free to interrupt!

Introduction

The Internet is the international network of computer networks. From a slow start it has grown into a global communications system 
   Year Machines
   1969       4
   1985    1000
   1987   10000 
   1989  100000
   1992 1000000 
   1993 2000000
Maybe 30 million are connected now. It was originally Unix-based. The infrastructure still is, but the majority of people now access the Internet from micros.

Imagine that you came from a place that didn't use paper. You'd be bewildered by the ways it's used to communicate - letters, newspapers, books (bookshops and libraries), postcards at post offices, phoneboxes, etc.

Each way is good at some things but not at others. If we move house we wouldn't tell friends by writing a book, or putting a note up in a post-office window. We'd write some letters. If we wanted to find yesterday's football results we wouldn't go to a bookshop. We know how to deal with these paper-based methods.

Now that computers are replacing paper there's a new set of communication methods to use. Some resemble paper-based methods, some don't. I hope today to show these computer-based methods, their strengths and weaknesses, and give you a flavour of what's out there.

E-mail

This is like paper mail, only it's faster, more reliable and cheaper (so why do people still use paper!). Everyone on the computing system at CUED has an e-mail address - mine is tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk (the '@' is the giveaway). Up to 27,000 messages/day go through CUED. One Computer Officer spends part of their time looking after it. It's usually one-to-one but it can be one-to-many - electronic mailing lists exist. A good place to look is Mailbase. Beware of junk e-mail. Many "e-mail programs" exist - pine, eudora, etc.

Newsgroups

Discussion groups. Also used for announcements. Over 8,000 of them. Special interest groups. All subjects. Some local. Examples are cam.misc, sci.engr.lighting, alt.sports.hockey.nhl.pit-penguins, microsoft.public.word.tables. Good places for getting help. Archived in DejaNews. To read or post message, use a newsreader like xrn, etc.

The World Wide Web

Harder to categorise. A huge library where anyone can add documents. These documents are like pages from a CD-rom encyclopedia - pictures and links.

Each document has a location (a URL). If you know this URL you can jump straight to the document. The URL of this document is 

   http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/tpl/talks/wwwpaper3.html
(the http:// bit gives it away). More info on URLs is online.

Tens of millions of these documents are online. How can you find what you want?

The program I've been using is Netscape - it lets you do mail, read newsgroups, copy files, and look around the WWW. It's an all-in-one program that gives the user access to different kinds of information - e.g. the Matlab page.

Demos

There are many diverse issues, both technical and sociological, that I could cover now. I think it's best to illustrate by example.

WWW technical problems

Adding Documents to the WWW

We have pages in the help system dealing with producing WWW documents and the WWW for admin staff.

You may also be interested in the logs for the CUED site.

Supplementary Reading

Updated on 9th October, 1998
Tim Love, tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk