(Photograph) - You are not new to the Internet. We are. Academics have been using the Internet (and its predecessor, ARPANET) for a quarter of a century. Newspapers ignored it until a year or two ago. Then they discovered that the Internet had quietly grown from a global village into a global city, with a population running into tens of millions. Like any other city, the Internet has culture, commerce, crime, sex, religion and politics. In the public mind, and on the overloaded wires of the network itself, these activities now compete with what many regard as the "proper" use of the Internet, scholarship, research and education.
The Times Higher Education Supplement is using the Internet, not to replace the printed newspaper, but to complement it with additional services which take advantage of the net's speed, interactivity and global reach.
There is no registration procedure and all information from our Internet Service is free. As a separate venture, the full text of the newspaper will soon be made available through selected online subscriber services.
Our Internet Service uses a program known as gopher, originally developed at the University of Minnesota. Gopher works on a tree structure of increasingly detailed menus. You can navigate through these using a few simple commands, though since these vary from one gopher client to another, we cannot supply a universal set of instructions.
Moving around with gopher is easy; remembering where you are, and where you have been, is more difficult. Our chart (right) should help you keep your bearings. For guidance on the more advanced gopher commands, consult your local Internet wizard or one of the numerous books about the Internet.
To navigate through the information on our "gopher server" you need a gopher client program. If your institution has a Unix system or a comparable operating system such as VMS or NT, you will almost certainly have a gopher client, and you may have a choice of several. You should be able to use this program either at your workplace or when you dial up the campus computer from home. On Unix systems you should be able to reach us by typing gopher gopher.timeshigher.newsint.co.uk and pressing the carriage return key.
You can also use our Internet Service if you have a personal account with an Internet provider such as Demon or Cityscape or with one of the online services such as Cix, Compuserve or Delphi. Most people access these services over an ordinary telephone line, using a modem. The exact procedure depends on the service and the software.
You may of course use graphical Internet browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape. We do not currently offer a full World Wide Web service, but we have a "home page" on http://www.timeshigher.newsint.co.uk which lead into the gopher menus.
Email addresses Announcements: netgazette@timsup2.demon.co.uk Subscriptions: subs@timsup2.demon.co.uk Back issue orders: back@timsup2.demon.co.uk Opinions on the newspaper and the Internet service, suggestions for mailing list topics: theschat@timsup2.demon.co.uk Letters to the editor for consideration for publication: theslet@timsup2.demon.co.uk Tony Durham, Multimedia editor: tdurham@timsup2.demon.co.uk * The Times Higher Education Supplement Internet Service: gopher.timeshigher.newsint.co.uk