Hooking up to the Internet

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 113

As we all know, the population density of APLers is not as high as we might wish; this makes us need to reach around the world to find the number of people we want to discuss APL topics with. Which is a problem, because long-distance phone calls cost money and the propagation delays of paper communications cost us immediacy.

But there is an answer, and I’d like to share with you what little I know so far.

I’ve addressed this to Vector, because the technology is only just becoming readily available to the individual in Britain now; the US has had better access for some time, and many companies already use similar facilities for their national and global communications.

The technology I’m talking about is Internet, and you can recognise someone who has access to it by their habit of sticking an email address with an ‘@’ sign on it to everything they write. I’d been frustrated for some time because I found that people expected me to be on the Internet, but those who were on were exceptionally vague about how it all worked. So I found out, and this is what I want to share with you. None of the services, publications, etc. that I mention here should be construed as being recommended, praised or condemned; they just happen to be sources that I’ve used to achieve successful connection. By the nature of my geographical location my specifics will be specific to a person based in London, but the sources will point you to possibilities everywhere in the world.

The Internet and Other Nets¶

The Internet is the world’s largest computer network; but that said it’s both anarchic and amorphous. It does not run as a commercial enterprise, so the first avenue for entry (look under ‘I’ in the phone book) doesn’t work. The thousands of computers that comprise the net are mostly in educational and research establishments, and have hooked themselves together on a more-or-less voluntary basis. What you have to be able to do is to reach one of these machines.

Other networks such as CompuServe are not the Internet, although you can exchange email between these networks. Indeed I used CompuServe for this purpose for over a year. It’s not perfect, but it works (within the documented limitations).

Information Sources¶

Try asking around locally; you stand a good chance of success if you have connections into a local college or university. You might also write to RIPE NCC, Kruislaan 409, NL-1098 SJ Amsterdam, Netherlands (phone +31 20 592 5065); naturally they prefer email (ncc@ripe.net). There’s also a book packed with useful information (remember, this anarchy does not provide a user manual) called ‘The Whole Internet Users Guide and Catalog’, written by Ed Krol, published by O’Reilly and Associates Inc. (ISBN 1-56592-025-2).

Types of Connection¶

From now onward I’m going to assume that you’ve decided to pursue this with the aim of getting your PC connected, because this is all I have personal experience of. The Internet is, to some degree, oriented towards UNIX but it truly is an agglomeration of all sorts of hardware and software. Suitable software for PCs, Amigas, Macs, UNIX and so forth is all quite readily available (and a lot easier to get once you’re connected — this is infuriating unless you feel well motivated at times).

There are two choices to make; either be a user at an established site, or become a site of your own. So if you call up your local college and they say OK you end up as mrapl@uhull.edu.uk (you choose the bit that goes before the @ in your email address). I did it the other way (which lets you choose some of the bit that comes after the @).

Who Pays for All of This?¶

I just knew you’d ask sooner or later; the glib answer is ‘the US Government, of course’. Yes indeed, ole Mom and Pop in their Kansas grocery store are paying to let you and me exchange email with our pals in the Obninsk nuclear research facility. It’s not quite as ideal as that, but every site covers its own cost as an overhead — you don’t pay Internet Inc. (how could you, they don’t exist).

The corollary to this is that there is a policy of ‘acceptable use’; what you do on the Internet ought to be connected in some sense with education or research. The policy isn’t rigidly monitored, but it would be bad form to take advantage of Internet connections to operate a company email network between your London and New York offices.

What you’ll have to pay is the hardware and software cost of setup, whatever your service provider charges, and telephone costs (to reach the service provider, not the same thing as the services you use).

The Financial Good and Bad News¶

I connect to a service provider called Demon Internet Services, who are based in London; their charges are £12.50 for initial enrolment and a monthly charge of £10. No usage charges. This is possibly a little more than I used to pay for CompuServe — but all I did there was to send and receive Internet mail.

The financial down side is that your service provider will probably encourage you to use at least a V32 modem (9600 bps); this is not unreasonable from their perspective because they’ve got a finite number of ports and if all of you folks with your ‘by appointment to Queen Mary’ mahogany-cased 300 baud acoustic couplers hog the lines all day then the service provider is going to have to buy some more lines and modems (and pass the cost on). You’ll probably find that it’s good news for you as well, because the modern-day email user has lost the knack for economical mail that always made the I P Sharp system such a pleasure to use.

The financial up side is that you will not need to splash out on a PC comms package, because you’ll get a special one from your service provider. This is because your machine is becoming a full-fledged (if leaf-only dialup) node on the Internet, and this runs on TCP/IP — you’re going to have a whole lot more going on than type a few keys, press Enter, wait for response.

The Software¶

Once again the hardened Internet nutter is going to tell you to download the software. Great, you don’t have it yet and you’re not paying for that fast modem until you know the service is worth having. Never mind, they’ll probably sober up long enough to send it to you on diskette.

Now, about this software…

It’s awe-inspiring stuff.

Take a backup. Take two, they might come in handy.

What I have is three things called KA9Q, SNEWS and PCELM; they all conspire to work together in one directory — but there are a few loose ends lying around and we’ve ended up with a few new environment variables. Along the way I encountered a totally trashed hard drive, DOS software that insisted on directory names being separated by forward slashes, DOS commands that produced gibberish, a CMOS clock that totally lost track of time and a PC that decided Eastern Standard Time was the timezone to be in.

But it all (sort of) works now, and on a scale of 1 to 10 I rate this stuff as harder than APL, but simpler than Visual Basic. The user interface is rudimentary and I’m not convinced that the file structures are robust enough to survive any sort of software failure. Nevertheless I can do the three major things that I want Internet access for — and who knows, there may be better stuff for me to download (or I might write myself some tools to do some of the manipulations I need).

Email¶

My principal motivation was to be able to send and receive email. Easy to do — just fire up PCELM and write the messages (handy tip — the PCELM configuration file has a parameter called ‘edit’ that lets you call up a simple text file editor, like DOS’s ‘edit’, a configuration line that says ‘edit edit’ is not the best idea you’ll have all year). Next time you start up KA9Q all your outgoing mail gets sent and you receive all that’s coming your way. This may include mail you sent earlier being bounced back because of bad addresses — although if this happens it often happens while you’re logged on to the network, surprising. Go back to PCELM to read and reply to the mail.

I’d better warn you of two types of characters you’ll encounter sooner or later. There’s the Email Vacuum Pump, who thinks that reading email is an adequate activity and never replies to anything. Then there’s The Phantom, who sends you mail that you can’t reply to because the address they gave you is bad according to the system. Both of these characters are more numerous on the Internet than they are on other systems.

News¶

News is a sort of mutated mail, that gathers together messages on related topics and sends you the whole lot. You can elect to join news groups, receiving all the traffic and making some of your own if you like. For example, if you have an interest in zymurgy, then there’s a news group. If you have less common interests, then you can join a newsgroup called ‘comp.lang.apl’.

News also makes you realise why that fast modem is important; my first news download got me more than 600 messages — all from my local service providers newsgroups. By the time a mail message has been through the mill a few times with bits appended, and with the Internet routeing stuff glued to the front it can be quite hefty (none of the IPSA To:BOW From: BOW ‘No’ succinctness here).

You elect to join (and leave) mailgroups through all of the software you got as a starter set — mostly it’s SNEWS, but there’s other stuff scattered around as well. Incidentally, you may not get a backlog of news as soon as you join a newsgroup; it took a day or so before comp.lang.apl started to trickle in.

Once your machine has grabbed the news (happens automatically when you dial in) you have to run a local program called UNBATCH to distribute it in a sort of orderly way into the newsgroups you set yourself up with before reading it with SNEWS. As I write this most of mine goes into place called ‘junk’ because I’m being fed more than I’ve organised myself to deal with — but I can still read it there. I get around about 50 news items per day and anticipate this figure remaining fairly constant as I disconnect from the irrelevant and hook myself into the more personally interesting. Thus proving that fast modems do not save money on phone bills — they just let you grab more stuff. A program called EXPIRE lets you clear off the old stuff, but I haven’t found a way yet to build an archive of the interesting ones only, maybe I have to do that myself.

There are literally hundreds of news groups; I downloaded a 500k byte file giving details — it almost certainly is not all that are available.

FTP¶

File transfer is a real gem; if someone on the Internet with a machine that allows logins wants to make a file available to other users then they can do it. You don’t even need an account on the machine you’re grabbing the file from. The facility is called ‘anonymous ftp’, so if you know what you’re looking for and the name of the machine all you have to do is start up ftp and log on as ‘anonymous’. Even if you don’t know precisely what you’re looking for but you know a place to look you can still log on and move around the directories.

Naturally, there are limits to all of this, and the information providers choose what to put in the accessible places. But if the file’s there, and you’re allowed to reach it, all you have to do is to get it and it’s on your own machine. Remember, this is education and research, no money changes hands; you’re dealing mostly with a country that has open access laws for things paid for out of the public purse.

Other Resources¶

Krol’s book talks at length about Archie, Gopher, WAIS and the World-wide Web; all ways of helping you find information you need on computers connected to the Internet. Not all of these are available on all hosts, and I really haven’t had time to explore any of it. You may be interested to know that even though Internet really isn’t about APL at all one of the resources singled out by Krol is WAIS. Much of the development for WAIS was done at Thinking Machines — remember them?

Telnet may or may not prove useful; it lets you log on to other computers, wherever they may be, for your local phone call. Not everyone will let you have an account, but some will. Your activity may not be regarded as benign if you use a computer in Japan just for the hell of it. This may rebound on the other people who are benefitting from the appropriate use of a very significant resource.

Summary¶

This is being written while most of this is very new to me; I would hope that by the time you read it I’ll know much more. I’ve used email as a way of keeping in contact with APLers around the world for several years; it works very well. I thought it was important to write this at an early stage in my direct connection to Internet because if I left it any longer I’d join the ranks of ‘oh sure, just sign up’.

Other networks exist, and their specific natures may suit your purposes very well. Nothing except money makes this an either-or situation. If you’re on another network (like CompuServe) we can still exchange email; we can share more if you’re on Internet directly (and to be fair, you can share things with other CompuServe accounts that you can’t let out to us).

Give it a try, you have only your hard disk to lose. The more of us there are reading comp.lang.apl the more of us there are going to be writing to comp.lang.apl, and the higher the chances of finding really useful stuff every day.

Can’t get the software going? Send me an email.