What is the Net and what's it good for?
A (brief) history of the Net
Internet tools and networks

Taking your first steps on the Internet? Our introduction will get you ready for your global adventure.

What is the Net and what's it good for?

This giant network of networks brings to your desktop so many possibilities it's staggering. It turns your computer into a super repository of knowledge. It transforms entertainment from the passive medium we've grown up with into an interactive medium of spiralling potential. It annihilates distance. It confounds traditional notions of human relationships. In short, it's a blast.

It's hard to know where to start -- so much is on offer. Maybe you need to settle an argument over whether Kenneth Slessor's middle name was Adolf or Albrecht. The answer's online. How did that blind fellow (what's his name?) manage to climb the sheer face of El Captain in Yosemite National Park? And while speaking of Yosemite, how can you order a copy of Ansel Adam's 'Moon Over Half Dome' to grace your walls?

Who was it who wrote "There's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England", and how does the poem finish?

Perhaps you're after more practical help, such as how to get the candle wax out of your new carpet? Or what's the latest flight you can get from Perth to Adelaide on Friday? Or how many kilojoules in a calorie?

It's all there. Entertainment, news, information, trivia, home shopping, freebies, people doing all kinds of things. And you can either enter the Net on a search-and-retrieve mission or float about being tossed aimlessly by the digital currents.

A (brief) history of the Internet

The evolution of the Internet is a delicious irony.

Cast your mind back to the days when the city of Berlin was divided by a wall, the days when MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction -- talk about ironies!) was in vogue. The days of the Cold War.

In those chilly days, a bunch of think tankers pondered the problem of how the US could maintain a communications network during and after a nuclear war. Obviously, such a network would have portions completely obliterated by atomic blasts, and it could not be dependent on a central authority, as such an authority would be a prime target in an attack.

Such a rugged, post-cataclysmic network needed to be designed on two fundamental principals: complete absence of central control, and the ability to continue to operate even when much of it was destroyed.

The first network based on these principals was set up in Great Britain in the 1960s. But it was the much bigger project funded by the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency -- Arpanet -- that became the kernel of the Internet.

Originally, Arpanet allowed members of the research community to share computing resources over long distance. However, researchers quickly subverted Arpanet into something much more useful: a place to share information, collaborate on projects and gossip. News and e-mail became the main network traffic.

As the '70s progressed, other computer networks linked up with Arpanet. All that was required to connect networks of diverse computers was an adherence to the lingua franca of the Internet, TCP/IP -- this impressive acronym stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, which is the protocol, or language, that allows all computers, whether PCs, Macs, Unix machines or whatever, to talk to each other over the Net.

By the '80s, the Internet had broadened far beyond its government and military origins, with educational organisations, community organisations and finally commercial organisations all latching themselves onto this ramshackle but robust network of networks. Growth was rapid, but not astounding. It was not until the emergence of the World Wide Web -- the friendly face of the Net -- that growth became so rapid that the Internet forced itself into the consciousness of the general public.

It's interesting watching governments now trying to turn around and control the Internet: censor it, restrict activities on it, stop its alternative technologies disrupting existing structures such as the major phone companies. Apart from the fact that the Net was designed to work without control and suited to anarchy and chaos, the explosive growth of the Internet over the last few years has made technological change on the Net almost impossible for anyone -- including would-be regulators -- to keep up with.

Internet networks and tools

The Internet is a worldwide network of networks, rather than a single network, with a vast array of tools to help you use these networks. Here are the most important of these tools and networks:

The World Wide Web. You've probably heard of the Web, as this worldwide network is known as. It's not the Internet, although you could be forgiven for confusing the two. It's just one part of the Internet. The Web is the part of the Net that gives us light and colour and movement: it's a 'publishing house' for multimedia creations as well as general information.

What has made the Web so popular is its use of graphics and easy menu-driven 'browser' software (for 'browsing the Web'), and the way it makes it oh-so-simple to wander around the global network of computers. With the Web, all you do is click a highlighted or underlined link in the text (or a graphical link) and you're whisked to the page, topic or site that link points to.

To learn more about the Web, see Using the World Wide Web.

Electronic mail, or e-mail. Many people use the net purely for e-mail. If you have a connection to the Internet with your own ID, you have an e-mail address, and so you can correspond with people around the globe.

If you want to exchange ideas and information with people who share your interests or passions, then newsgroups and mailing lists are the go.

See Using E-mail.

Newsgroups (formally known as the Usenet). These are a massive collection of electronic bulletin boards devoted to almost any conceivable and the occasional inconceivable topic.

See Using Newsgroups.

Mailing lists. If you want to keep close tabs on a particular topic, you can subscribe to a mailing list. You'll then have the contents of a particular 'bulletin board' (or Web page) delivered directly to your e-mail box. Watch out! Some of these mailing lists litter your Inbox with hundreds of messages per week

See Getting on Mailing Lists.

FTP or File Transfer Protocol. Maybe you want to delve into the richness of files on the Net. New software, games, documents, pictures and lots more can be downloaded onto your PC using FTP, enabling you to fetch computer files from other computers on the Internet.

See How to download files (using a Web browser), or if you're more ambitious, Using FTP (using a special FTP program).

Search engines are special Web sites usually dedicated to allowing users to search the mountains of information on the Internet -- mostly on the Web, but some also search newsgroups and other parts of the Internet.

See Using Search Engines.

Gopher and WAIS. While these tools aren't as fashionable as the Web's search engines, they can be invaluable for digging out information.

Tell a gopher what piece of information you're after, and it'll go scurrying off looking throughout the Net for you, returning with its results. For instance, if you're after a particular computer program to download, you can use a gopher to find a copy of the program stored on the Internet, and then use FTP to transfer that file to your computer.

For extracting information from databases and catalogues, you can use WAIS. If you search these databases yourself, you'll find each one has its own particular search rules. WAIS lets you search without knowing the particular techniques or commands needed by each database or catalogue.

IRC or Internet Relay Chat. You can also `talk' (well, `type' to be more accurate) live to anyone else on the Net using IRC. There are chat `channels' for any topic you care to mention, and it's a real buzz to sit in front of your PC typing away to some fellow soul who could as easily be in the next room as in Alaska.

And there's more. Keep an eye on the Internet (and our Net Guides in particular) and you'll find new tools all the time. Things like Net phones, which allow you to make long-distance calls without long-distance charges, or RealAudio radio broadcasts.

What software do you need?

Until recently, you needed separate programs for each aspect of Net useage. A mail program such as Eudora; Veronica for your gopher searches; WS_FTP for file transfers; Mosaic or Netscape for Web browsing; Internet Relay Chat for online conversations and so on.

Now, the major Web browsers -- Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer -- are adopting a kitchen sink approach and including tools to let you do almost anything you like on the Net from your browser. With the latest versions of these browsers, you can send and receive electronic mail, read newsgroups, surf the Web, download files from FTP sites, and search for information throughout the Net. You can even do some other neat things such as voice-talk across the Net, chat and teleconference.

See our Software selection for more information.

By Rose Vines