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CS 314: Assignment 1 -- Internet
Homework Number 1
Date Assigned: January 31, 1995
Date Due: February 7, 1995
To submit your answer
You will submit your answers to this assignment via email. See the
instructions below.
Introduction
The Internet offers a wide variety electronic information resources.
This assignment touches on three of these resources---the World Wide
Web (WWW), the newsgroups, and electronic mail (email)---and on the CS
314-related information available therein.
Prerequisites
You will need access to the Internet and to a WWW browser, a
newsreader, and an email application in order to complete this
assignment. All four of these services are available in the Upson B7
Mac Lab, via Bear Access EZ-LINK, to those with C.I.T. NetIDs
and passwords. The instructions for this assignment will be for Bear
Access, but you may use a different combination of access
applications---e.g., NCSA Mosaic, rn, and mail
from a Unix account---if you wish.
Bear Access
In order to use Bear Access, you will need a C.I.T. NetID, a
valid C.I.T. password, and two blank floppies (one for mail and one for
news). Bear Access can be found on the B7 Macs under the Apple
menu.
Once launched, Bear Access presents you with a menu system, from
which you may access the WWW browser, Netscape, the newsreader,
NewsWatcher, and the email application, Eudora. This
handout contains only skeletal instructions for the use of the these
applications; we recommend that you read the C.I.T. documentation on
these applications if you are not familiar with them.
WWW
The WWW is an Internet hypertext resource. WWW documents may contain
text, GUI forms, graphics, sound, animation, etc., as well as hypertext
links to other documents on the Web. The ``web'' in ``World Wide Web''
refers to the structure implied by these hypertext links. You can jump
from document to document, across machine, organizational, and
geographic boundaries, by following links. If you think of the
documents as nodes and the links as edges in a graph, you'll get the
idea.
CS 314-related material on the Web
A fair amount of information related to CS 314 is available via the WWW
from the CS 314 home page. Lecture notes, homework assignments, and
course information are currently available. Videos of the lectures may
be made available on the WWW in the future.
Using Netscape
Click on the World Wide Web the Bear Access top-level
menu to launch Netscape. Hypertext links in documents may be
displayed as blue, underlined text or as blue-outlined icons. Clicking
on a hypertext link will cause the document referenced by the link to
be retrieved. The title of the current WWW document is displayed in
the title bar of the Netscape window (this is the ``document
title from the title bar'' referred to below). The Location
field gives the current URL (more on this later). The Home
button may be used at any time to return you to the default document.
(In the B7 Mac Lab, the default document is the CUInfo home page.) The
Open button may be used to jump to an arbitrary URL. We
recommend that you take a look at the Netscape handbook (select
the Help -- Handbook menu item) for further instructions on how
to use Netscape and for further information on the WWW.
Accessing the CS 314 home page
After Netscape has been launched, you should see the CUInfo home
page. The procedure for reaching the CS 314 home page from the CUInfo
home page is as follows:
Click on... From document...
Other Cornell Web Servers CUInfo Home Page
Cornell University. Dept. of Computer Science Other Cornell WWW Servers
Course Home Pages Cornell Department of Computer Science
CS 314: Introduction to Digital... Cornell Course Home Pages Spring 1995
You should now be viewing the CS 314 home page. Spend some time
navigating the documents linked to this page; try to get a picture of
how the various documents are linked and what the overall structure
is. When you've become somewhat familiar with the CS 314 page, and
with Web navigation in general, answer the following questions.
1. Start from the CS 314 home page. Click on Table of
Contents, then click on Generations of Computers.
Click on Next (either one). What document are you now
viewing? (Give the document title from the title bar.)
2. Now, navigate back to the CS 314 home page. How did you
accomplish this? (Give a sequence of clicks, button presses, menu
choices, etc. There are several possible answers.)
3. Finally, you should get used to searching through the Web for
information whose location you do not know {\sl a priori}. Answer the
following question: in which CS 314 WWW document is the acronym ``RTL''
first defined? (Give the document title from the title bar.)
URLs
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is basically an address of a WWW
document. For the URLs which you'll be using in this assignment,
the address is absolute (as opposed to relative);
it can be used from anywhere on the Internet.
``Opening'' a URL simply means retrieving the WWW document at
the address referred to by the URL; you might think of this
as ``jumping'' to the document.
4. Open the URL http://www.hyperion.com/. What is
the title of this document?
5. By now, you should be getting used to tracking down
information on the Web. Try to answer the following question, starting
from the Hyperion Web page: who was the director of the {\sl Babylon
5} epsiode, ``A Race Through Dark Places''?
Newsgroups
The newsgroups provide a sort of Internet bulletin board where
messages may be posted and read by a wide variety of people with
similar interests. CS 314 has a dedicated newsgroup,
cornell.class.cs314, which may be used for announcements,
feedback, questions of general interest, etc.
To access the CS 314 newsgroup from the B7 Macs, click on the
Network News ("Usenet") menu item on the
Bear Access top-level menu, then click on the
NewsWatcher Help menu item and read the instructions.
Configure and run NewsWatcher as specified in the instructions.
Once NewsWatcher has been configured and is running,
go to the Full Group List window.
Scroll down through the list of newsgroups until you see
cornell.class.cs314. Double-click on
cornell.class.cs314. A cornell.class.cs314
window should appear, containing a list of messages (actually,
a hierarchical list of authors and subjects of messages, organized by
threads).
Double-clicking
on a message will bring up the full message, which consists of a
header (the From:, To:, etc. lines above
the double-line) and a body (the part below the double-line).
6. Find the message with the subject cs314 hwk1
article and date Sun, 29 Jan 1995 20:47:24 GMT.
What is the body of this message? (It should be four lines of text.)
See the C.I.T. documentation for further information on the newsgroups
and on NewsWatcher.
Email
The Bear Access email application, Eudora, may
be accessed via the Mail menu item on the top-level
Bear Access menu. Click on the Mail Help item
and read the instructions there. Configure and run Eudora as specified
in the instructions. Once Eudora has been configured and is
running, you may send a message by selecting
Message -- New Message from the menu at the top of the screen.
See the C.I.T. documentation for further information on electronic mail
and on Eudora.
Submitting Answers
Send an email message to cs314@cs.cornell.edu with the
subject cs314 assignment 1 answers. Include the following
information in your message:
Name (Last, First):
Cornell ID:
Address:
Phone:
Grading (letter, S/U, or audit):
College, major, and year in school:
Proficiency (on a scale of 1-5, 1=don't know, 5=guru) in
C:
FORTRAN:
BASIC:
Pascal:
Scheme:
Other languages (please list):
Computer science courses taken so far:
Answers to questions 1-6: