Also, many educational sites run WHOIS servers of their own, to offer
information about people who may be currently on the staff or
attending the institution. To specify a WHOIS server, many
implementations include some sort of option or qualifier---in VMS
under MultiNet, it's /HOST, in Unix -h. To receive
information about using the Stanford server, one might use the command
whois -h stanford.edu help
A large list of systems offering WHOIS services is being maintained by
Matt Power of MIT (mhpower@stan.mit.edu). It is available via
anonymous FTP from sipb.mit.edu, in the directory
pub/whois. The file is named whois-servers.list.
The systems available include, but are certainly not limited to,
Syracuse University (syr.edu), New York University
(acfcluster.nyu.edu), the University of California at San Diego
(ucsd.edu), and Stanford University (stanford.edu).
"Fingers were made before forks."
Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation
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Commercial Services
Many services can be accessed through the Internet. As time
progresses and more outlets for commercial activity appear,
once-restricted traffic (by the NSFnet Acceptable Use Policy) may now
flow freely. Now that there are other networks for that information
to travel on, businesses are making their move.