Finding information on the Internet, circa 1993

  • Article

I went through my bookcases this weekend, getting rid of books I didn't want anymore, and came across my 1994 edition of "American Library Association: Guide to Information Access". Highlighted on the cover: "Includes the Internet and Other Electronic Sources".

Scanning the table of contents, I flipped to page 61 and began reading the eight pages dedicated to the Internet for a trip down memory lane...

  • BITNET
  • NYSERNET
  • JANET
  • EARN
  • NREN
  • An explanation of FTP
  • An explanation of TELNET

Then I came to the Finding Tools section. Not "how to find tools", but rather "tools for finding". Check it out:

Using the amount of information flowing from the Internet has been compared to "drinking from a firehouse". Individuals must find a way to channel the deluge of information. Finding exactly what you are looking for requires some specialized tools.

Archie, which comes from the word archive, is such a system. Developed at McGill University, Archie is software mounted on various server computers around the world. It can be accessed in different ways, but one of the easiest is to telnet to the nearest server, log on as Archie, and ask it to look for the address of a file you want. The catch here is that you must already know what file you want, which might not be obvious in certain situations. Every Archie server periodically scans about 900 sites on the Internet and adds names of files to its data store, so it is constantly being updated. One Archie server is archie.rutgers.edu.

Gopher is a finding tool for the Internet that was developed at the University of Minnesota (whose team mascot is a gopher or go-fer). Gopher was the first real attempt to help searchers navigate the maze of computers on the Internet. It looks into the menus of all the computers it knows about and finds information to match the key words you ask it to find. Accessed by the command Gopher, it is available in widely varying versions for different operating systems.

Another method for retrieving information is WAIS, the Wide Area Information Servers. Developed at Thinking Machines Corporation, it attempts to find what you want within the files or databases it knows about by looking for a term or terms. There are simple WAISes (and more advanced ones) which will try to refine your search by finding other documents that are most like the ones you chose from an initial search.

And that was the state of things just about thirteen years ago...(and yes, there was a Veronica and Jughead too)