News comprises thousands of newsgroups covering many subject areas. To access News, you need an account on a computer which receives Usenet feeds and access to a Newsreader program such as Tin. Or you may be able to read news through a WWW browser. You can only participoate in newsgroups that are carried locally. The local computer is used as a terminal to the remote computer.
File transfer enables copying of files from one computer to another.
At anonymous ftp archives you log in as 'anonymous' and give your e-mail address as the password. You can search for a specific term and get back a list of locations for matching files and directories. Some Archie clients will also retrieve selected files. It allows you to browse through network resources easily, moving from one server to another, and to retrieve a file simply by selecting a menu item. Links to other Gopher servers result in network wide cooperation to form the global Gopher web, often called Gopherspace.