E-mail, FTP, Telnet etc. Packages used in this course

A variety of packages exist to run E-mail, FTP, Telnet etc. not only for Macintosh computers but any computer in general.

The packages chosen reflect general popularity of usage worldwide but do have to reflect some resource limitations and the use of a Macintosh as a public domain machine.

See online documentation for some details on how to use the packages.

Students should also learn how to locate and run the packages from the Macintosh Hard Disk. Further (more detailed) documentation may also be found inside the respective package folders.

The main packages used to explore the Internet in this course are:

• E-mail --- Mail Drop.
• FTP --- Fetch, Interarchie.
• Telnet --- NiftyTelnet, BetterTelnet.
• USENET --- News Reader.
• Gopher --- Gopher.
• WAIS --- Gopher, Netscape, Internet Explorer.
• WWW --- Netscape, Internet Explorer.

Note that WWW Browsers, such as Netscape or Internet Explorer (see next lecture), can actually achieve most of the above. Indeed we do not formally study gopher and WAIS tools as they have largely been superceded by WWW browsers. Telnet will actually get ``spawned'' by Netscape. FTP can generally be achieved via Netscape but some FTP sites may not work and for FTP Fetch has a very good interface. Due to the fact the the Macintoshes in the Lab are not public domain. It is NOT recommended that you use Netscape for reading E-mail.

USENET newsgroups whilst not being formally a large part of this course can be very useful. You are encouraged to explore this for yourself. Netscape and stand alone news readers are equally adept for this task.