Tarr says he uses the Web "for getting movie reviews, for doing electronic shopping, for reading about my favorite rock bands, for downloading new files for my computer, and mostly for just procrastinating when I'm not in the mood to do work."

James S. Gwertzman '95 says he is impressed by what he can access through the Web: "up-to-date Boston movie listings, ski conditions in the Northeast, and weather forecasts are just a few of the things that I use the Web for."

Ishir Bhan '96, co-president of Digitas, says he has even seen people use the Web to monitor the visual status of a coffee maker in England.

"One use I have seen allows you to get a picture of a coffee maker in a certain building," Bhan says. "If you were near that coffee maker, you would know how much coffee was left without having to leave your room."

But while most students say they primarily use the Web for fun, some do take advantage of the academic resources the medium offers.

Hekman says she uses the Web to find places that have on-line versions of books.

"Recently, for my thesis, I needed to find a book, The History of the Kings of Britain, in electronic form so I could scan for specific words, and I used the Web looking for that," she says.

Gwertzman, a computer science concentrator, also says the Web has made thesis research easier.

"I have not had to visit a library in over three months thanks to the number of Computer Science professors that have home pages on the World Wide Web," Gwertzman says.

Stewart, an astronomy concentrator, says she uses the Web to contact astronomy departments at other universities so she can "access information about what other researchers are doing in my field."

Crawling on The Web

While the Web has received a flurry of public notice through the mass media in recent months, most people are not aware of how to access it.

The major on-line services--Prodigy, America Online and Compuserve--have all promised support for the Web. Most recently, Prodigy announced that it will provide Web access within several weeks.

The Harvard High-Speed Data Network (HSDN), which is the University's connection to the global data communication network called the Internet, allows students to access the Web through in-room data jacks at extremely high speeds.

Getting connected to the Web requires an active HSDN data jack, a network-capable Macintosh or Microsoft Windows-compatible computer and "browser" software to navigate the Web's hypertext pages.