My friends who read the New York Times but who don't make a living from computing often want to know how they can get on the "information superhighway." It's understandable when newspapers frequently headline how the "in" crowd is getting on the "Iway," and companies are jockeying for advantage with megadeals in telecommunications and entertainment. Politicos from Gore to Gingrich tout high-tech projects from reinventing government to laptopping the poor.
What is the "Internet?" In non-technical terms, the Internet is a collection of many thousands of computer networks that are interconnected. One such network is Yale's own campus data network. Any computer that is attached to our network is "on the Internet." (Strictly speaking, you need to have TCP/IP software installed before you can fully participate. Some PCs and VMS computers may not have this software.)
If you use a dial-in connection to Yale, are you on the Internet? The answer is "maybe." The traditional dial-in connection on a PC or Macintosh gives you a single window (a "terminal emulator" like YTERM, Zterm, or TINCAN) that you may use to talk to a particular computer. This does not put your PC or Mac on the Internet, although the host machine you connect to, such as Minerva or YaleVM, likely is an Internet host. The point is, all your PC can do is to talk with the host computer in a single "session." Most terminal emulator software provides some form of file transfer, such as ZMODEM or Kermit, but this preempts your typing session.
A newer form of dial-in connection actually brings the Internet into your home computer. The Serial-Line Internet Protocol (SLIP) will do it. A SLIP connection uses special software at Yale and in your PC or Mac to give your machine the illusion of a direct connection to Yale's campus network and the Internet. With SLIP running, you may run all the standard network software that you would run in an Academic Computing cluster, such as NCSA Telnet, Fetch (FTP - file transfer protocol), News readers, Netscape/Mosaic, YaleInfo, etc. A client POPmail program, such as Eudora, allows you to send and receive mail directly from your home machine. What is the advantage of SLIP for dial-in connections? SLIP is very flexible. You can have numerous sessions going at one time -- Telnet login sessions, file transfer, etc. You can run graphical applications like Mosaic or Netscape, also. There is much less need to log in to a central computer like Minerva. If you have an office machine at Yale, your home computer environment can be almost identical to your office machine.
There are some practical disadvantages to SLIP. You cannot use some older home computers. (See below.) You need a fast modem, at least 9,600 bits per second but preferably 14,400. If your main activity is running Telnet to log in to a Yale host, you will find that SLIP introduces extra delays between your typing and the appearance of the "echo" on the screen. A non-SLIP connection will seem much quicker for simple typing.
An additional dial-in service is available to Macintosh users -- AppleTalk Remote Access (ARA). ARA works like SLIP, except that in addition to the TCP/IP Internet service, you also have Yale's AppleTalk network. The AppleTalk network has AppleShare file servers with extensive program archives, the Instructional Computing server for class homework, QuickMail, Meeting Maker, and a number of other Macintosh-specific services.
Although SLIP and ARA may be usable on smaller machines, I recommend at least a Macintosh II-class machine (68020 or higher processor) or a PC running DOS/Windows on an 80386 or higher processor. The advanced network client software, like Netscape or Mosaic, should have 2 MB of RAM available, so your computer should have at least 4 MB of RAM.
For the details on how to connect, contact the C&IS Internet Information Center, at iic@minerva.cis.yale.edu or 432-5116. The IIC has afternoon office hours at the Computing Center, 175 Whitney Avenue.
Martin Ewing is director of the Science and Engineering Computing Facility. Send comments and questions to martin.ewing@yale.edu, or call 432-4243.