Why is the Internet Important to Your Degree?

During your three years at Cardiff the Internet and its use will play a very important and ever increasing role in your education:

E-mail

-- The departments main means of communication between:

• Staff-Staff
• Staff-Student
• Tutor-Student
• Student-Student

Newsgroups

-- Newsgroups contain a lot of technical detail and also discuss common problems, solutions etc. Whilst not a major component of this course you are strongly advised to investigate newsgroups.

WWW

-- Extensive and increasing use of the WWW is made by the department. Some examples include:

• General Department and Course Information
  • General Information. Computer Science Home Page
  • Computer and Software documentation
  • Maps of Buildings.
• Student Information. Computer Science Student Information Page
  • Staff lists,
  • E-mail lists, searchable E-mail addresses
  • Personal Tutor lists,
  • Laboratory timetables,

WWW (Cont)

    

• Lecture notes and Lecture support material. Computer Science Home Page
  • Course information, reading lists, timetables.
  • Downloading of computer material, programs, printable lecture course notes, exercises, solutions etc.
• Personal use for individual projects and coursework.
• Searching the WWW for all kinds of Information.
• Downloading files from all over the WWW.

FTP

-- an easy way to transmit files directly to another computer.

• In this course you will need to upload programs from the macintosh computers to a more permanent location on the Dept Unix machines. FTP will be used for this.
• You can find lots of useful and educational programs around the Internet. FTP, Archie (FTP search engine) and Netscape are equally important in this respect.

Telnet

• Telnet is useful for direct (text only) contact to another machine.
• Whilst this is not as useful as it once was due to the WWW. There are still some uses for Telnet.
  • Some old systems/programs still exist.
  • Text access is a lot faster if that is all that is required.
  • Can be used a terminal window on a remote host. Many machines still have command line based windows (Unix and MS-Dos prompts are still used).
  • Some Bulletin Board Systems still use this method.