Appendix D: What's in "Life Beyond CompuServe"?

Part II of "The Joy of Telecomputing" provides a comprehensive survey of the online world. It covers the three major groups of online systems:

Commercial online services (America Online, BIX, CompuServe, DELPHI, GEnie, MCI Mail, Prodigy, etc).
BBS (including discussions on FidoNet, RIME, etc)
The Internet (including discussions on UUCP, Usenet, Bitnet, etc).

1. Commercial Online Services

In general, commercial online services do not offer good price/performance, though some of them excel in certain areas (such as e-mail). We'll look at the major commercial online services (CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, etc.) and see what they offer and what they are good for. Major topics covered are:

What are the major commercial online services?
How much do they cost?
How can you access those services?
What do they offer? How do they compare with each other?
How do they compare with BBS?

2. The World of BBS

It is estimated that more than 30,000 bulletin boards exist in the United States. If you live in a metropolitan area, you'll probably find hundreds of BBS that are local. Most BBS operate as a hobby by their owners and without charge to their users. There are many BBS that have members all over the United States (and the world).

The world of BBS has become a phenomenon. BBS are no longer isolated systems. Fidonet, the network linking thousands of BBS around the world, allows users on one BBS to communicate with those on other BBS. Recently, with gateways to the UUCP network, many BBS has allowed their members to exchange e-mail with users of the Internet and to participate in Usenet newsgroups.

We'll cover the following topics:

How many BBS are there? How do they compare?
How much does it cost to become a member?
What are the limitations?
How to find BBS numbers?
Which BBS offers the latest and greatest files for PC users? Macintosh users? Amiga users?
Which BBS are good for chatting? Which are good for conferences?
What is Fidonet? How does it work? What does it offer?
How to join Fidonet as a node?
How to become a point on Fidonet?
How to send e-mail from Fidonet to Internet (and from Internet to Fidonet)?
What is RIME?
What are the major BBS software available?
How to use BBS effectively?
What software tools you need and where to find them?
BBS Etiquette
Why ZTerm is the best program to use for calling BBS? (For Macintosh users only)
What are MacBinary files? How to download a Macintosh file to a PC? How to download a PC file to a Macintosh? (For Mac users or people who use both Mac and PC.)

3. Internet

Internet is a global computer network linking hundreds of thousands of computers (mainly UNIX computers) at universities, research institutions and government agencies. Internet is unsurpassed for e-mail and conferences (called newsgroups in the UNIX world). It is also an invaluable resource for free software. Some major topics covered are:

What is Internet
What is UUCP? What is Usenet? What is Bitnet?
What can you do on the Internet
How to send e-mail on the Internet?
How to send e-mail from Internet to CompuServe, MCI Mail, Fidonet (and vice versa)?
How to send binary files?
What newsgroups are available?
How to participate in a newsgroup?
Etiquette
What is FTP?
What is Anonymous FTP?
How to use FTP?
What are the FTP sites available?
How to find the files you need?
What is telnet?
What can you do with telnet? (Read "The Cuckoo's Egg" by Cliff Stoll for a first-hand account on how a German hacker use telnet to break into computers on Internet.)
How to use telnet?
How can you get an Internet account?
What services are available? What kind of access level do they offer?
How much do they cost?
How to transfer files from a UNIX host to your personal computer?
What are uuencode and uudecode?
What are compress, tar and shar?