UpDate - Vol. 14, No. 9, Page 7
October 27, 1994
TechTalk
Programs help you to navigate the Internet

     The Internet is a computer network that connects computers at
universities, research laboratories, government offices and
corporations throughout the country and around the world. These
computers are connected together in a way that enables them to
communicate with one another.
     All faculty, staff and students at the University have access to
the full range of information available from the Internet.
     The information on the Internet is stored on computers called
servers. These computers "serve" information to those who ask for it.
The computers that ask for the information are called clients.
     Because there is so much information on the Internet-and new
information is added daily-a few programs are available to help you
locate information quickly and easily. These programs- gopher, Mosaic
and Lynx-use interfaces that simplify finding, viewing and retrieving
information.


Gopher
     Gopher is a program that allows you to find, view and retrieve
information from other gopher servers connected to the Internet.
Gopher was developed at the University of Minnesota to provide a
friendlier interface to the information that the University wanted to
make available to its faculty and students. Now, other universities
also run gopher servers. Our gopher server is called U-Discover!
Gopher servers not only make an institution's information available to
its community, they also provide an easy way to connect to other
gopher servers on the Internet. Information on a gopher server can be
a menu, a document, results of a search and a telnet or ftp
connection.
     Gopher programs present the information stored on gopher servers
as a linear series of menus. Each menu item is numbered and labeled
with the topic of that menu. You can move up and down sequentially
through the menus.
     You can use U-Discover! either from a desktop computer that has a
gopher client installed and is directly connected to the campus
network or by logging on to one of the University's central systems
(such as strauss or mvs).

Mosaic and Lynx
     Mosaic and Lynx are programs that allow you to access information
stored on World Wide Web (WWW) servers-the Web for short. The Web is a
collection of information linked together on the Internet. You may
also hear Mosaic and Lynx referred to as browsers because they help
you browse through Internet information.
     Unlike gopher information, Web information is not organized
linearly. Instead, Web information is organized associatively in
hypertext documents. These hypertext documents are linked together by
hypertext links.
     Hypertext links allow you to move to Web documents from many
different places.
     You do not have to move through menus sequentially.

Mosaic
     Mosaic can display formatted text, images, sounds and movies.
     It can also read documents from different sources; download
information; search documents and databases; and contain hypertext
links to gopher sources and ftp sites. The hypertext links can appear
as text or graphics. Generally, the Mosaic interface uses graphics and
sound.
     You can use Mosaic either from a desktop computer that has a
Mosaic client installed and is directly connected to the campus
network or by logging on to one of the University's central systems
using an X terminal.

Lynx
     Lynx is a program that allows you to view Web information on
computers that do not have graphics capabilities. Using Lynx, you can
read the text of a Web document, but you can't see the graphic images.
The hypertext links appear as boldface or underlined text rather than
as graphics.
     You can use Lynx by logging in to one of the University's central
systems.
                                                        -Suzanne Nanis