Yale's networks connect you to the world

Yale's own network connects all the public machines on campus with several large servers, from which students may do anything from accessing academic software to copying the latest games. Students who have purchased network connections in their rooms may even set up their personal computers as file servers, which allows access to their machine from anywhere on campus. Ethernet, a type of high-speed networking technology, is available in all the residential colleges and Old Campus.

Once you choose to move beyond Yale into the world of the Internet, possibilities become nearly endless. The Internet's most common use is for electronic mail (e-mail), though other sources include LEXIS-NEXIS, Usenet, Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and the increasingly popular World Wide Web (WWW).

Every undergraduate at Yale receives an email account free of charge, and email has become the preferred method of communication on campus. Or try talking in a real-time typing conversation (called "n-talk") with a friend at another university. E-mail and n-talk are handled through Yale's trio of Pantheon UNIX computers: Minerva, Mercury, and Morpheus. Think of them as your post office serving the Internet, delivering information to 60 million in the blink of an eye. Federal Express never dreamed of such great service.

LEXIS and NEXIS are indispensible tools for researchers, allowing them to connect to a database of over 600 publications. Need another bibliographic source at 1 a.m.? No problem--just run a quick search through the database, copy the text to your document, add a few quotation marks, and presto--you're done!

You've probably heard about Usenet and the controversy surrounding plagiarism and pornography on the Internet. The Usenet is a giant collection of newsgroups, with topics ranging from alt.beer to comp.mac.games to alt.sex. You can post a message of your own, or read the opinions of thousands of others--completely uncensored, completely unrestricted.

How about procrastination? Feel the need to roam? Try surfing the Internet through the World Wide Web. The web is the unifying mode of accessing information on the Internet, combining Gopher, Usenet, and even e-mail into linked hypertext pages. Each page is a screenful of text and pictures, with embedded links to other pages. To move to another page, or another continent, just click the mouse and you're there. And then click again, and again, and again, as you fly though cyberspace.

All of these services are available at any of the public computing clusters around campus. Besides the residential college computer rooms, clusters are located in Connecticut Hall, Cross Campus Library, Dunham Lab, and Phelps Hall. Connecticut Hall on Old Campus is conveniently located for frosh, and is open 24 hours a day. If you want to access the network from your own dorm room, you can pay to have your computer connected. This in-room connection will allow you to send and receive mail directly from your personal computer and print to the nearest public printer.

Confused? Eager to jump right in? Be sure to attend one of the Computing Orientation Sessions, which occur during the first week of school. Yale also provides a whole team of Computing Assistants whose sole job is to help you with your computer. Feel free to ask them about setting up an e-mail account, creating your own web page, or even converting your computer to a file server. Whether you are a computer neophyte or a hard-core hacker, Yale and the Internet will have something to offer you. Hugh Hunter contributed to this article.

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