Hello all!
This week begins a mini-series in the various ways of finding files on the Internet. This week in particular we will look at something called ARCHIE. No not Jugheads,Moose,and Betty's friend. Though Veronica will come into the picture on subsequent lessons! The Internet is so large,vast,everything, you know that there must be a wealth of informational files out there. How does one exactly get to them. I mean even if you know there are some in China and you know how to get there, how do save time by being able to go exactly where they are? To get these sometimes tiresome task done you really need to hire a gopher to do the job!
If these and other questions are beginning to flood your sometimes Cyber geared mind,read on...
To accomplish this marvelous feet you need tools with which to work. You need a tool that will allow you to do a search and tell you exactly where in on that Internet Server in China that file is. Such as took is a searching program called ARCHIE. You will like the reliability in using Archie, because it updates itself often to ensure that the latest file listing are available on the numerous servers from which the program is run. In simple terms all this is, is a program that is running on a computer. When you use Email, an Email program (e.g. PINE) is running on the server (machine) to allow you to use that function. When you use the World Wide Web, it's just a program again running on another server. I hope this somewhat takes the complexity away from these terms.
You would log on to an Archie server with by telneting there (remember the Telnet Lesson? No? Do not pass go do not collect one hundred dollars! Go immediately to your Forum,BBS Conference News Group, WWW site and get that lesson!). All that is needed is a Archie I.D no password is required. Now isn't that special? Archie was created by the Archie Group at McGill. The persons responsible are Bill Heelan,Peter Deutsch and Alan Emtage.
To get an FTP Site listed send Email to archie-admin@cs.mcgill.ca. At the Archie Command prompt as at most, you can type the command help for additional information. You can type the command MAILTO to enable the option of having search results mailed to you. Additionally you must also use the command MAIL to actually get the results sent. The LIST command will show you machines that are connected to your database. The PROG command will allow you to look for items. An example would be "PRO LESSONS" which would display the number of matches and databases that have been searched. The command WHATIS is useful for finding out what a file contains. This is only useful if in fact the creator has included a description which is done by sending the same to the address given for listing your site.
For more information the authors can be reached at archie-1@cs.mcgill.ca. Via FTP you can go to quiche.cs.mcgill.ca and tot he archie/doc directory and look for the files whatis.archie and archie.man.txt
Well this wraps another Cyber-Lesson. Next week granted all goes well, we'll look at Archie's "better half", Veronica
Our Tip of the Week
-------------------
Where do you go to get TONS of goodies for your Mac?
Answer.
FTP
Where?
sumex-aim.stanford.edu
directory info-mac/*
Where do you get CDROMS with loads of files for just about no cost?
Answer.
Where?
orders@cdrom.com
Ask for Free Catalog