Still, it's better to be able to get files than not get them. Companies wired into the Internet often block ftp, telnet, and gopher access for security reasons. Using the other ftp sites is similar. Logging into a remote site via telnet looks much like logging directly there. Telnet sites are reference either by site name or numeric ip address.
Gopher provides a more automated way to get information from the Internet than ftp or telnet.
WAIS WAIS stands for Wide Area Information Server. As I understand it, WAIS is a database that functions like an index to resources on the Internet. Like ftp, telnet, gopher and WWW, to use WAIS you need to run a client on your Internet machine, or you need to point your WWW browser at a WAIS server. Info on client programs can be found in the usual Usenet newsgroups such as comp.protocols.tcp-ip.ibmpc for PC versions. This means that WWW documents can have links to other documents which can be anywhere on the Internet.