You must have file ownership or permission before you can edit or create a file. In general this means you must own a file or you must be logged in as system adminstrator. You own a file if you created it, you downloaded it through ftp using your username and password, or if ownership was assigned to you using the "chown" (change owner) command.
Lets suppose you want to create a .forward file. This is a good task for pico. Telnet into the main computer (brandx.net) and login with your username and password. Make sure you are in the right directory (your startup directory). For this example it will be /usr/home/test1. Here's my conversation with the computer:
Brand X INTERNET login: test1 Password: BSDI BSD/386 1.1 Kernel #16: Fri Dec 1 17:28:00 PST 1995 You have new mail. Brand X: {1} % pwd /usr/home/test1
Looks good. Now type "pico .forward" to start a new file called ".forward", and we see the following:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- UW PICO(tm) 2.3 File: .forward -----------------------------------------------------------------------------