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Chapter 15: Your Computer Is Not Alone
Overview
In This Chapter Discovering who else is using your computer by using the finger command
Fingering people who use other computers on the Internet
Communicating with other user computers by using the write and talk commands
Talking to everyone at the same time
Getting your UNIX box on the Net
From the beginning, UNIX was designed as a multi-user system. In the early years of UNIX computing, keeping an entire PDP-11/45 (a 1972 vintage minicomputer about the speed of a Palm Pilot but the size of a trash compactor) to yourself was considered greedy. It was also kind of expensive. These days, the cost argument is much less compelling — unless your computer is a Cray supercomputer or the like — although UNIX remains multi-user partly because it always was and partly because multi-user systems make sharing programs and data easier.Even if you have your own workstation but are attached to a network, your machine is potentially multi-user because other people can log in to your machine over the net, as we technoids call a network. (On the other hand, you can log in to their machines, too. See Chapter 16 for details.) Don’t confuse net — any network of computers — with the Net, which is what we technoids call the Internet. In this day and age, all anyone ever talks about is the Internet. If your computer is attached to the Internet, you can talk to literally millions of computers.In this chapter, you see how you can nose around and find out who’s on your system and on other systems to which you’re connected. For the most part, we talk about the net — the computer network to which your machine is attached. If we mean the Net (also known as the Internet), we say so. After you find out who’s out there, you can look into getting in touch with them.
Tip If you are the only person who ever uses your computer and you don’t have a network or a phone line (your computer is all alone in the world), skip this chapter — in fact, skip this entire part of the book.
