Most people currently on the Internet have been Netizens less than two years. The vast majority of these share the opinion that the World Wide Web is the Internet. This opinion is furthered by the fact that 16% of all Internet users use America Online, with its GUI interface, as their ISP. Someday (regretfully) the WWW may become the Internet, but for now, the Internet is still made up of a number of different areas, defined by the means used to transfer the information from one user to another within each area. The World Wide Web uses the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to transfer files between a server (sometimes called a Daemon) and a program on your computer (called a Client).

The Internet is implemented in such a manner that the transfer protocol used to transfer files is the protocol best suited to most efficiently move a certain type of file. HTTP is used for WWW communication because it does the best job of moving rich-content files like web pages. NNTP is the most efficient for moving plain-text, and is therefore used for Usenet files, and SMTP is most efficient for personal communications, so it is preferred for E-Mail.

One of the most widely used Internet protocols is ftp. ftp (almost never capitalized) stands for File Transfer Protocol and is the protocol by which binary files (programs, pictures, and support files) are transferred across the Internet. Binary files are stored in archives (space on somebody's hard drive, somewhere) and can be accessed by an ftp client, or by a web browser or Telnet; and some can be accessed by SMTP, as well.

Although many ftp archives can be accessed by a web browser, they are best accessed by the use of an ftp client. Modern clients have the ability to queue multiple files for downloading, from multiple sources, and virtually all will resume a download that has been aborted (whether from disconnection, a broken path across the Internet, or shutting your computer down), making it unnecessary to restart a download from the beginning.

There has been a tendency, in recent years, for software developers to build "all-in-one" Internet clients that do HTTP, SMTP, NNTP, and ftp. The web browser you are using is probably one of these clients. It will do HTTP well, but it will not do the other protocols as well as dedicated clients for those protocols. Also, with the "browser wars," the online media hype of the competition between Netscape and Microsoft, these two giants of the software industry have been creating fancier, (much) larger clients that support an ever-increasing amount of rich-content, but haven't improved upon their handling of SMTP, NNTP, or ftp, since version 2.0 of each. Net-newbies tend to gravitate toward rich-content sites, but as more people become familiar with the Internet as a library resource, the content of a website becomes much less important, and the importance of the information it contains becomes much greater.

Many web surfers (estimates are between 25-45%) disable Java and ActiveX support and choose to not load the images, on the websites they surf, to decrease the time it takes to load webpages. They trade the "loss of rich content" for the ability to collect information more rapidly, as their appreciation of the fact that their own time is valuable, increases. Dedicated ftp clients perform their operations "in the background" (as do dedicated Mail and News clients), that is, you start it, select what you wish it to do, and continue surfing. They are a tremendous timesaver over the course of an evening, and many, as well, will dial your ISP, log on to the Internet, download files, and then logoff, enabling you to download files while you're not at your computer, and allowing you to download files during "off-peak" hours, saving time, because the files move more quickly along a less busy, less-burdened Internet and, if you have metered access like most Europeans, saving money too.

These ftp sites are organized by content, with specialized sites listed first, and archives listed at the bottom of the page. The specialized sites contain updated drivers for computer hardware, updates for Windows software, common Internet applications and their updates, and *.dll libraries for when you get that awful Windows dialog box: "Cannot execute program. ????????.dll missing or corrupt."

Between the listing of specialized sites and archive sites is a section called Information. These have no archives, but provide commentary and reviews of software, and provide download links to the reviewed software. The "major" archives are, for the most part, located at universities and contain virtually everything imaginable. They are vast repositories (some in excess of 2 terabytes of storage and 100,000 downloadable files) for enormous collections of programs and utilities for UNIX, DOS, Windows, and Macintosh based computers.

The files on these sites are freely available and freely downloadable. Many are shareware, programs which you may "try before you buy;" Many others are freeware, programs that are totally free, and authored for the sheer joy of creating an application. For those [who may be] apprehensive about a program for which you are not obligated to pay, please consider the following: the best, most widely used WWW server in the world (Apache) is freeware. The best and one of the most widely used ftp daemons in the world (WAR) is free. The top E-Mail clients in the world (Eudora and Pegasus Mail) are free, as is the most-used, and second best NNTP newsreader (Free Agent). The two most flexible and least crash-prone operating systems in the world (BSD and LINUX) are free, and the list goes on...

Parker Information Resources
Houston, Texas
E-mail: bparker@parkerinfo.com