One of the first things you can do is surf the World-Wide Web (WWW). lynx is a program similar to the more familiar netscape, but it can run on vt100 terminals. A WWW page consists of text (there are also pictures and sounds, but you're not going to get these on a dumb terminal), some of which is specially highlighted to indicate that it is a link to another piece of text. You can hit the space bar to scroll through a page of text; the up and down arrows to select the previous or next link; the right arrow to go where the currently selected link points to; and the left arrow to get back to the place you were at before you followed the most recent link. You can also type G, then a URL, to go directly to some page on the WWW. This will work for all the URL's mentioned in this booklet. http://www-linguistics/ will get you to general information about the Linguistics Department. And you should definitely try URL http://doors/~sr/computing/, which contains links to almost everything you might want to know about computing, including information about local computers. Type H at any time to learn more about lynx, and Q to exit the program. The Sweet Hall consultants will be offering a class on browsing the WWW on Oct. 20. 2:00 PM in Sweet Hall 025.
Although you can just barely get by doing mail on csli without learning a text editor, you don't want to. In order to avoid sending mail with lots of typos and references like ``Forget everything I said two lines above'', you'll need to learn a program that lets you edit what you have already typed. And an editor is a necessity for writing and editing papers: You can save your papers to a file and edit them again later to make the unending stream of revisions that is the lot of the grad student. The editor you will want to use on csli is called emacs. You'll want to learn it real soon. See URL http://doors/~sr/computing/emacs.html for information about emacs. The Sweet Hall consultants offer introductions to Emacs in Oct. 11, 2:00PM in Sweet 025, or Oct. 12, 6:00 PM in Meyer 260; take the UNIX class first.
It's a bit harder to be dogmatic about choice of mail programs. The system treats your incoming mail as one big long file of text in a file with your log-in name within directory /usr/spool/mail/. A mail program lets you treat this as a set of individual messages that can be read, deleted, forwarded, replied to, or saved in different files. It also makes it much easier to send mail messages. But mail programs in general all do pretty much the same thing, csli provides an astonishing variety of them, and you will find partisans here of each of them. You might want to consider mm, a very old program whose sole advantage is that many of the older students already know it (as we go to press, we have heard rumours that mm may in fact be dead by the time the school year starts, in which case you should not consider it very seriously); mail, a very old program whose sole advantage is that it is found on all UNIX computers, no matter how badly maintained they are; and rmail, a very old program whose sole advantage is that it is built into, and therefore fairly well integrated with, emacs. We recommend elm, which is new enough to have some fancy features, but old enough to have most of its bugs worked out. It is one of the most commonly used mailers on campus. Its interface is clear enough that you can pretty nearly make do by just typing elm and then playing it by ear. But do look at http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/computing/elm.html, and consider taking the Sweet Hall class on the subject (Oct. 9, 2:00 PM in Sweet 025; or there is a 6:00 PM class in Meyer 260 on Oct 10, 16, or 19); take the Emacs class first.
Your own mail address will be your csli login name, to which is appended @csli.stanford.edu, e.g., kessler@csli.stanford.edu. This is the form you should give out whenever people outside the Department ask for your Internet mail address. But you don't really have to type such long addresses in most cases: You can truncate the parts of the address that you share with the recipent. So instead of sending mail to myfriend@leland.stanford.edu, you can send mail to myfriend@leland (most students at Stanford have mail addresses @leland). And instead of sending mail to kessler@csli.stanford.edu, you can just type kessler. (Similarly, you don't really have to include the .stanford.edu part when accessing local URL's via netscape or lynx.)
The csli computer has programs for reading news groups. News groups are simply forums where people can publish open letters on a particular subject, and anybody can read them. There is a wealth of useful information in many news groups, and a huge amount of dross. It's up to you to decide whether the signal-to-noise ratio is acceptable. At any rate you should consider reading some of the CSLI groups, especially csli.linguistics.linguist, which echoes the linguist mailing list: We are asked not to subscribe directly to the mailing list, to ease the burden on the mail system.
We recommend that you use the news reader nn. There are thousands of groups out there, and so you might want to consider starting off small; otherwise you may find the wealth of material either tremendously frustrating, or tremendously addictive. If you invoke nnl, you will get just the CSLI groups, including the linguist group. The UNIX man page explains all about nn: Type man nn. Or if you are really adventurous and want to get your feet wet immediately, type nn, then :man, then =.*, then Z, then hit the space bar to step through the manual that is built into the program. The manual is organized as a series of news articles within a news group dedicated to the nn manual, so you get to practice even before you know what you are doing. (Hint: to quit, type Q.)
It is fast becoming de rigueur to produce articles and even your QPs in ``camera-ready'' format: nicely typeset with justification, multiple fonts, and fancy characters just like a published journal article. Everybody here uses either Word or LaTeX. It is radically different in philosophy from Word. Whereas the latter is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get), LaTeX users edit a file that looks nothing like the final paper, which is produced by running a typesetting program over that source file. This has obvious advantages and disadvantages. Most people would agree that the decisive factor is that LaTeX documents are generally prettier. For example, this extremely good-looking booklet was produced by LaTeX.
Some students feel that since Word is by all accounts easier to use, they will start off using Word then switch to LaTeX when the time comes to submit a really fancy paper somewhere. Keep in mind though that that day is coming much sooner than you think. Since the two systems are completely different, learning Word will not prepare you for learning LaTeX, and so you will have to start learning again from scratch, precisely at that point when you have no time to learn a stupid document processing system. Verb. sap. See http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/computing/latex.html for more information on LaTeX. And by all means cajole your fellow students for their source files, to use as a pattern or for inspiration.
UNIX has a windowing system similar in principle to that of Macs or Windows. It's called X Windows, and it lets you do some nice things like run Netscape (which you could do on a Mac anyway) and preview the quality of your LaTeX documents (which our Macs aren't set up for). X Windows of course requires graphics-oriented displays, such as those found on SparcStations or HP workstations. There are a few of these available in the Department, at CSLI, and at Sweet Hall. Those in Sweet are all accessible if you have a Leland account, which you should get even if you don't ever want to touch a workstation, because occasionally things like voting in campus elections requires a Leland computing account. See http://doors.stanford.edu/~sr/computing/open-leland.html for details about why you should want an account, and how to get one. To learn more about X Windows, take the Sweet Hall class on Oct. 13, 2:00 PM, in Sweet 025.