The Bovine Online package from UCD Information Technology is a collection of programs that are available to UCD students and staff, including Netscape (WWW browser), Eudora (email), WinCRT (telnet), and more. The CDROM and documentation are available in the UCD bookstore computer shop for approximately $15. More information can be obtained about this package from Information Technology's bovine online web site at: http://online.ucdavis.edu/
The objectives of laboratory 3 include learning about networking and useful services available via the Internet and more word processing capabilities that will make writing your term paper easier.
The Internet is a collection of connected networks that communicate with a common protocol and provide a collection of services including electronic mail, remote login, file transfer (ftp), gopher, usenet newsgroups, and access to the World Wide Web.
Each computer on a network (including the Internet), is called a host.
Note: The Internet is not a collection of phone lines! Computer networks are usually composed of cables (we will see examples in another lecture shortly). Only when direct cable connections are not available (to your house, for example), are modems used. Modems are very slow compared to direct cable connections.
A number of applications that access the Internet have been installed on the computers in the labs on campus. You will use the following ones during this laboratory.
FTP allows users to copy files from one machine to another. The capability called anonymous FTP is particularly useful. This means that you can copy files from or to a computer without having a personal account on that computer - you can log in as "anonymous".
Archie is a search program that can be used to find ftp sites where specific file(s) are available.
Newsgroups (also called usenet newsgroups) contain a collection of messages written by Internet users and grouped by subject area. Each message is called an article. Newsgroups are accessed by a newsreader program. Netscape includes a newsreader facility. Other newsreaders are tin (text mode similar to pine under Unix), rn (text mode under unix), and xrn (graphical interface under Unix and X-windows).
The reader selects newsgroups on topics that may interest them and then read any of the articles posted under that topic. The reader may also post (create a new) articles. There are thousands of newsgroups, some on technical topics, others purely recreational in nature.
For this class, we have two newsgroups set up for our use at UCDavis: ucd.class.ecs15 (for the staff to post announcements to the class) and ucd.class.ecs15.d (for students to post questions of others, including other students and the staff). There are also newsgroups for programming languages, like Scheme (an example is comp.lang.scheme).
Note that the ECS15AT course has a separate newsgroup ucd.class.ecs15at for their use.
See pages 9-10 of Netscape At a Glance for more about newsgroups.
The World-Wide-Web (WWW) is a network-based information service that uses the Internet. Each file available on the web is called a page (even though it may require many pages to actually print the information). Information on "the web" is accessed with a browser. Netscape (Lab 4) and Mosaic are the most common graphical browsers and they are available for a wide variety of computers. Lynx is a text-based web browser particularly useful if you are dialing up with a modem, but do not have a SLIP connection and graphical browser software. With Lynx, you will see all the text and can follow links, but you will not be able to directly view any graphical images on the pages you visit.
In this lab, you will learn how to use a number of more advanced wordprocessing features that will be useful for your term paper. These include page numbers, double-spacing, and paragraph indentation.
Go to the index of
lectures for ECS15 - Fall 1997 .
Go to the homepage for ECS15 - Fall 1997 .