Bulletin Boards are still around. In fact, one of the easiest ways to connect to the Internet is through a national bulletin board service. One disadvantage of this method is that—as of this writing—national BBS's like CompuServe offer only E-mail. You can't FTP or Telnet from them. And they often charge per message for E-mail, so using them can be quite expensive. There are better ways.
<Chapter 2> What is the Internet?
The best way to think of the Internet is as a communications medium like the Telephone, Television, or the Postal Service. Using the Internet you can send a any written text by E-mail. This is rather like mailing a letter and having it arrive in seconds—three days in the most backwards parts of the world. Using a special protocol called File Transfer Protocol you can transfer text files that are too long to mail (over about 50 pages) or even transfer graphics and programs. If E-mail is the equivalent of "talking" to a person, then Telnet, the third main Internet service, is equivalent to telephoning a computer. As long as you know the password for logging on to a computer, you can access and search any of nearly a million computers. Details of E-mail, FTP, and Telnet are contained in Chapter 5, Internet Basics.
This chapter puts the Internet into context. Rather than concentrating on the trees that will occupy us in later chapters, it paints a big picture of the computing world in which the Internet has evolved. When you pick up a telephone receiver you know you can dial households, businesses, or government offices. You can dial 800 numbers or 411 for information. You know how to get the time or weather, get your credit card balance, or leave a message on an answering machine. In short, you have a good idea of what might possibly be at the other end of the line and a great deal of experience with negotiating their various intricacies. But you are new to the Internet. Some sense of "what's out there" in this new world is necessary to avoid getting lost in the thickets of acronyms, numbers, and procedures developed by different vendors.
As we approach the middle of the 90s, the normal working situation in offices is approaching something like this: there is a Local Area Network (LAN) connecting together personal computers, workstations, and mainframes of different makes. The LAN (pronounced like "land" without the "d") may be connected to other LANs as part of a Wide Area Network (WAN). The WAN may or may not be part of the global network called the Internet. In colleges, universities, and research laboratories it likely is part of the Internet; in the commercial world, except for a few high-tech companies, it likely is not. But the difference between academia and the commerical world is rapidly becoming blurred.
In addition to the LANs and WANs there are many, many home and office computers that *could* be part of the global network using a modem-to- host connection. These computers can be the portable computers of outside salespersons connecting to the central office to file a report, a computer in a home-operated desktop publishing company connecting briefly to the Internet to get a graphic for a newsletter, or a parent sending E-mail to their child at college.
<Section 2.1> Getting Over Shell-Shock
Let's face it. Not many members of the public—even the computer literate public-are on the Internet. There are three reasons that using the Internet for the first time can be rather intimidating, even though it is actually rather simple to use, when you get down to the nitty- gritty of internetworking:
o Getting on to the Internet can be a little bit complicated;
o The capability of logging on to computers you've never used before by its very nature means facing unfamiliar—and hence uncomfortable— situations; and