Valdis Kletnieks is one of the academic computing support people at Virginia Tech. His talk centered around the archive and file servers available to users on the Internet.

The Internet is a VERY large world-wide network of computers, all of which use TCP/IP as the communication protocol. As of last July there were 992,000 hosts on the network, and 4,000 separate interconnected subnetworks. The Internet is currently growing at a rate of about 10,000 hosts per week.

Because I am not directly connected to the Internet, I couldn't relate to much of what he had to say. I have an account with a local Unix system, which in turn is connected to an Internet host. So while I have the ability to exchange electronic mail with anybody on the Internet, I can't take advantage of any of the interactive goodies; I can't directly log on to another host, for example.

Valdis talked about university-based information servers with exotic names: Gopher, Archie and WWW (World Wide Web). Sure do wish I could get to 'em.