See an unfamiliar term? Check the newsletter glossary.
News from:
M V C o m m u n i c a t i o n s , I n c .
P.O. Box 4963
Manchester, NH 03108-4963
(603) 429-2223
March 1993
Note: text copies of all issues of the monthly newsletter can be found
on mv in the public archive; look in /news2/pub/mv/inews.
MV goes interactive
Beginning in April, MV Communications is offering online accounts
on our Internet-based systems, in addition to our UUCP access. With
an online account, you can access Internet facilities such telnet,
FTP, IRC, and others. This access can give you an interactive Inter-
net account without the headache of administrating your own system, or
relying on a benefactor to provide that system for you.
An online account on mv will put you live on the Internet and
will give you the ability to use a wide-range of facilities, such as:
electronic mail, to put you in touch with any of millions of peo-
ple on worldwide networks;
FTP, to retrieve any of tens of thousands of files available on
the net. These include programs, images, literature, reference
material, data, and so forth;
gopher, to wander amongst information sources all around the
world;
IRC, the Internet Relay Chat system, to hold real-time conversa-
tions in the global community;
telnet, to access accounts on other Internet systems, as well as
data services found on the net (e.g., weather and earthquake
reports, sports schedules, library databases);
Usenet news, a global distributed bulletin board system through
which you can share opinions, learn from experts (and, we might
add, get into fierce arguments);
Our online accounts are provided on UNIX systems, and if you're fami-
liar with UNIX or at least tolerant of its command line interface you
can have direct access to a UNIX shell prompt. But there's no need to
be daunted by the thought of UNIX: MV is also providing an easy-to-use
menu system that will let you access all the basic Internet facilities
MV Communications, Inc. March 1993
- 2 -
that we offer.
MV is also pleased to offer to our online users access to Clar-
iNet news at no extra charge. ClariNet brings an electonic newspaper
to you over the nets, with UPI newsfeeds, syndicated columns by such
authors as Dave Barry and Mike Royko, sports reports, business news,
computer technology updates, and various feature stories. These are
divided into easy-to-find newsgroups which you can browse online.
The rates for MV's online accounts are:
First 5 hours each month: $2.00/hour
Next 5 hours: $1.50/hour
Next 10 hours: $1.00/hour
Remaining hours: $0.75/hour
There is a minimum monthly charge of $5.00 per month for online
accounts; for new users, the first 3 hours of the first month are
free. We also offer group rates, educational discounts, combined UUCP
and online account (companion account) plans, and as always, bonuses
for new account referals.
The Whole Internet - A guide by Ed Krol
Related to online internet access is a popular question: what can
you do, and how do you do it? There are several good guides to
accessing the Internet; we talked about one recently: The Internet
Companion by Tracy LaQuey, with Jeanne C. Ryer.
A very nice and detailed tour of the Internet is The Whole Inter-
net - User's Guide & Catalog by Ed Krol, published by O'Reilly and
associates. At over 350 pages, this book tells you how to get started
on the net, what some of the terms are, how to handle names and
addresses, and gives a good description of many of the services and
facilities of the Internet. The "Catalog" section is a rundown on
many of the resources that you can connect to or otherwise make use
of.
Miscellany
MV has reorganized; we're now servicing our callers via multiple
client machines, and we've added quite a few phone lines for UUCP and
online access. We hope that the reorganization has left everything in
place, but if you have any troubles, please let us know.
One side-effect of our reorganization is that our UUCP archive
tree is now in /pub rather than in /news2.
New arrival in the archives: ToadNews, a news software package
for the Macintosh that works with UUPC. It's in /pub/mac/toadnews on
mv as the files tn1.0.cpt.bin and tn1.0.intro.
MV Communications, Inc. March 1993