The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Guides to Free Tours of the Internet Available--for Free on the Internet

One of the best things about the Internet is the wealth of information it contains about itself. This level of self-absorption is understandable when you’re as complicated and sexy as the Internet happens to be, and besides, all this stuff is free. That’s important to Net users, who seem unwilling to pay for practically anything.

Who can blame them? When it comes to Internet guides, for example, a great many are available gratis. Unfortunately, they are often hard to find and might well be out of date, thereby highlighting the essential flaw of the “information wants to be free” philosophy that is so prevalent on the Net. The flaw is that when information is free, it isn’t always very good. In this as in all else, you usually get what you pay for.

Still, with a little effort you can get your hands on several useful guides to what the Internet is, how to use it and so forth. These can be especially useful on your hard drive, where you can quickly search for the instruction or reference you need.

Perhaps the premier free Internet reference work is the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Guide to the Internet” by Adam Gaffin (originally famous as “The Big Dummy’s Guide to the Internet,” not to be confused with the “for Dummies” books published commercially by IDG Books). This cheerful and extremely useful work is available as raw text (in English, Hungarian and God knows which other languages), a Postscript file, a Macintosh Hypercard stack, and, my favorite, Windows Help format. This last puts EFF’s guide at your fingertips in a form of hypertext familiar to anyone who has ever pulled down “help” from a Windows menu.

As an Internet guide, EFF’s is hard to beat. It’s reasonably up-to-date (get version 3.0), free and available virtually everywhere, including CompuServe--where I got the Windows Help version--America Online, and EFF’s own site. Try ftp.eff.org, gopher.eff.org, https://www.eff.org/, or call the EFF BBS at (202) 861-1223. On CompuServe, you’ll find this guide in the Internet New Users Forum, along with some other useful stuff. On AOL, use keyword EFF. (EFF archives a host of Internet guides, in fact. If you have ftp, visit ftp.eff.org and change directories to pub/Net--info/Guidebooks.) Another of my favorites in Windows Help format is known as InfoPop/Windows, or IPWIN for short. The latest version I know of is from August, 1994, which compares favorably to most books on the market, given publishing lead times. This Windows Help file, created by Clyde W. Grotophorst, contains excellent, concise instructions for using various Internet features, and also listings of such Internet resources as on-line library catalogues and where to find them. In short, a must-have for Internet users who run Windows. You can obtain this fine freebie via ftp from gmutant.wrlc.org. Change to the pub/gmutant directory, set binary and get ipwin124.zip, or something with a very similar name if there is a later version. You’ll need to unzip that, of course, after you download it.

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For a real Internet classic, also available blessedly free of any charge, get yourself Brendan Kehoe’s “Zen and the Art of the Internet.” Although this work is now about 3 years old, it’s still eminently useful for Internet basics. You can get it wherever electronic Internet guides are stored, including by anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org. (A somewhat later version was published as a book by Prentice-Hall.) I even have a Windows Help version, but of course I can’t remember where I got it, and I can’t find any sign in the file itself.

For a whole course on the Internet and how to use it, new users might consider Patrick Crispen’s Internet Roadmap. World Wide Web users can visit his home page at https://ua1vm.ua.edu/crispen/crispen.html. The road map--really a kind of workshop--is also available by e-mail. Send a message to listserv@ua1vm.ua.edu; the subject is irrelevant, but make sure the body says simply get map package F=mail.

Some pretty good excerpts from “The Internet Guide for New Users” by Daniel Dern can be had via gopher from gopher.internet.com. (The full text is published on paper by McGraw-Hill.) Also at this site is Dern’s “Internet Info, News and Views,” a collection of useful things put together by this knowledgeable Internaut.

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A nother useful guide available via World Wide Web is Steve Franklin’s “The Newbie’s Guide to the Net” at URL: https://www.hip.com/franklin/franklin.html.You might also want to check out the Internet Tools Summary at https://www.rpi.edu/Internet/Guides/decemj/itools/toc3.html.

For more interactive guidance to the Net, there is a kind of ask-the-nerds project known as the Internet Direct Computer Mentorship Program, available via Web browser at URL: https://www.indirect.com/mentorship.html.

And finally, a handy trove of many Internet guides is available via the Web at gopher://mindvox.phantom.com/11/Internet/Guides. Check out the Internet Tour, for instance.

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And to Kiss the Blarney Stone . . .

With St. Patrick’s Day upon us this Friday, everybody in cyberspace ought to be feeling a wee bit Irish. Thanks to reader Dennis Doyle, this year you can act on those feelings. Doyle, a Celtic harpist and professor of English at Glendale Community College, has assembled a remarkable list of all things Irish in cyberspace, a list he has agreed to provide to all comers just for the asking. Featured are several Irish home pages on the World Wide Web, including https://celtic.stanford.edu/pmurphy/irish.html and https://www.bess.tcd.ie/ireland.html. Doyle’s list also includes pointers on where to get Irish sound files, Irish news, Irish recipes and just about anything else you can think of relating to Ireland and the Irish experience. You can get the list via the World Wide Web at https://futon.sfsu.edu/ jtm/Gaelic/irish--srcs.html, or by e-mailing Doyle at ddoyle@cello.gina.calstate.edu with the subject IRISH LIST. Cead mile failte!