If you have an account on Harvard's fas system, I'll bet you have a little secret you don't share with anybody else. You log in a few times each day, wait a few minutes for the fas% prompt to rear its head, and then... and then...

You type pine, check your e-mail, quit, and log off. And that's all you do with your account. I know you feel ashamed, embarrassed, wasteful. I know you're thinking, "I pay $30,000 a year to go here and all I know how to do is run pine."

And yet I know that when you're in the computer lab, you look over and see other people doing very non-pine things from their accounts. It's time to stop cowering before the pine gods, and get on with your life as a card-carrying netizen.

The first step on the road to recovery is to realize that the fas% prompt isn't "just" for e-mail. When you use telnet to connect to fas.harvard.edu, you're opening what's called a "session" on a big, expensive machine in the Science Center.

The fas% sign is what's known as a "command prompt." When you type pine and press the Enter key, you're simply telling fas to run an Internet e-mail program called pine. But fas and all of Harvard's Unix systems have dozens of other programs just waiting to be called.

One popular diversion for fas users, and the Internet community, is known as Usenet, or netnews. Usenet is a system of bulletin boards that operate across the Internet, allowing individuals to read and leave messages on a variety of topics.

Messages on Usenet aren't "real-time;" you don't miss out if you're not there every second. Instead, each of these messages are stored for a certain length of time, accessible when you want to read them. Think of it as a protracted conversation with individuals who aren't constrained by location or schedules, but who come together to discuss common interests.

If these interests are anything, they're wide-ranging. Usenet groups, as they're called, are named hierarchically, making it easy to find what you're interested in. Some are broad in nature, like rec.sport.basketball; others, like misc.health.therapy.occupational, are designed for more narrow interests. Harvard currently carries about 5,000 of them, with more added daily.

It's not complicated at all to read news; just type tin at the fas% prompt instead of typing pine. Tin is a perfect newsreader for beginners, and a great way to get into the world of Usenet.

Even if newsgroups don't interest you, the fas system has tons of other resources for you to use. One of the most popular is the online Harvard phonebook.

The 495-1000 system gets pretty slow during the day; if you're in a hurry, simply type ph at the fas% prompt, where is the last name or full name of the person whose number you want. You'll find out their phone number and e-mail address in a matter of seconds.

Once you've tracked down a person's contact information, you can use fas% to see if they're logged on. Unix has a popular command known as finger that lets you find out when and where a user last logged on. To check on Jane Radcliffe, for instance, you'd type finger jradclif at the fas%. To find out more about the user, add a space and the letters -1 after the jradclif, in this case.

And don't forget that the fas% is your key to the status symbol of the 1990s: your very own page on the World Wide Web! Forgo pine for a bit, and you can create a masterpiece about, well, anything you feel like putting on the Web.

The details of staking out a place on the 'Net can be daunting to new users, so local Web-celeb Cindy Alvarez, the Web designer for the Harvard Computer Society, has put together a handy guide for making your own home page. Check it out at http://hcs.harvard.edu/~calvarez/web-lesson.html.

What are you waiting for? Why are you still reading this column? Go read Usenet, or make your Web page, or stalk your friends. You're ready to leave the world of pine behind.

Kevin S. Davis '98 is the coordinator of HASCS' Advanced Support Team and an independent computer consultant. You can reach him via e-mail at ksdavis@fas,harvard.edu.