Dialing into the World with Telnet
Electronic mail and Usenet are both focused on offering discussion forums through various means, but there’s a world of additional information available through the Internet, too.
There are a number of ways to access the far-flung databases in cyberspace, but the most popular, and easiest, is probably something called telnet, for telephone network.
The program works by connecting you to a remote computer and then sending to that computer everything you type on your screen; once you’re logged on, everything from the remote machine appears on your local display. With telnet, you can dial into thousands of computers connected to the Internet—even those overseas—without ever worrying about remembering phone numbers or racking up long-distance phone bills. Electronic mail addresses require you to know names of users and the full names and domains of their computers, but for telnet, you only need to know the computer name.
Sitting in California, for example, you can use telnet to connect directly to the United States Library of Congress Information System (LOCIS) and search its card catalog. You can also try connecting to the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania to search for business information or the holdings catalog at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Once you have an Internet account, you can also telnet directly to a variety of commercial networks such as CompuServe and Dialog. You’ll still need to open an account on these services before you can access the information stored there, however.