Sometime on Sep 22, Nikhil Joshi assembled some asciibets to say:

would like to know , how to find out whether I am sitting on a networked workstation or on a stand alone PC.

Check if you have any network interfaces up. /sbin/ifconfig will list all currently active interfaces. lo is your local interface. If this is the only one that you have, then you are standalone. If you see stuff like eth0, eth1, then you are networked using ethernet. If you see ppp0, ppp1, etc, then you are networked using a (presumably dial-up) point-to-point connection. Others could be slip and plip, but I doubt you have these or the rarer types.

Philip