Joy of Access

Read at your own risk

2011 October 1/10:32 PM

This document dates from the early web period, and is kept for archival purposes only. It is no longer updated, and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.

Welcome to the Internet. Do you know what it can do for you?

by Jerry Stratton

http://www.hoboes.com/NetLife/Joy/

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Section, with no Front-Cover Text, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License”

What Do I Need To Know?: You need to know what you’re doing here. That’s number one. What do you want from the Internet? Free information? Conversation? Software? Dead tunes? There’s so much stuff out there that if you don’t know what you want, you’ll end up getting swamped with everything. Unless you have some plan of attack, you’ll be lost like Hansel and Gretel in a cookie factory.
What Do I Need To Have?: A heart, courage, a brain, a home? Don’t worry, you’ll get all of these on the net.
How Do I Get On-Line?: I’m assuming that if you’re reading this, you’re already on-line. If you’re reading this from a public library or from the office, and you want to be on-line at home, you need a computer, some sort of modem, and an Internet Service Provider. If you have cable service in your area, check with them first. Cable-based Internet access generally comes with a modem, and they’ll install it for you! Your computer needs to have “ethernet” installed. If…
The Internet: The Internet is a collection of networks. That’s what the name means: it’s a way of hooking different networks together and translating their different languages to a Universal language and back again. So, for example, Apple Macintosh computers, on an Apple network can talk to Windows computers on a Novell network. They share data—electronic mail, literary works, risqué pictures—via the Internet, even though the Windows computers can’t talk…
Joy of Access: Hosts: Each computer on the Internet is a host. Negative Space, for example, is a host computer. So is the Macintosh on my desktop. The Windows computer holding up my printer is not a host. It isn’t directly on the net. It could be, but it’s too much work when I’ve got a Macintosh here as well. Back when I used a modem and the telephone line to connect, my Macintosh was only a host computer during those times when I dialed in to the net. Now that I have…
Joy of Access: Domains: Hosts live in domains. “Domains” are those parts of the net that fall under one organization. Like the industrial world, there was once a time of company towns. Teetot, PWA, and Cerebus, for example, all exist in the domain ACUSD.EDU. That’s the domain of the University of San Diego, my day job. Other companies, such as Qualcomm (QUALCOMM.COM) or General Instrument (GI.COM), have their own domains.
Joy of Access: Users: “The only two activities where the participants are called users,” went a conversation at an Internet Engineering Task Force meeting, “are drugs and computers.”
What’s Allowed?: Nothing is allowed on the net. Everything is accepted—by somebody, somewhere. There are two hundred million people on the net, and some of them are bound to be as crazy as you. A few are even crazier.
The Word Made Flesh: Almost all discussions on the net take place via the written word. There is experimental software that transfers voice, and even video, across the net for two-way communications, but these require state-of-the-art computer equipment and a fast net connection. You have neither, and the vast majority of the people you’ll be interacting with also have neither. (You can, of course, download Quicktime or Realvideo and get one-way transmissions in a…
Freedom Of Speech: Anyone on the net can receive electronic mail. It’s part of the definition of being “on the net”. People who are completely on the net can do ‘talk’ as well, engaging in immediate, written, conversations. Next year, you’ll be able to talk by actually speaking into a microphone, and even, if you have a video camera, let the other person see you. There are people doing it today, but they’re computer geeks and porn stars.
Freedom Of Assembly: Talking on the net isn’t limited to just two people at a time. There are real-time discussion groups, places to hang out, and places to carry on long-term discussions.
Passwords and Security: You have a username and a password for many things on the net. You must keep your passwords secret! If someone else gets your password, they can get into your account, read your mail, delete your files, change your files, change your mail, use your account as a stepping stone to breaking into other people’s accounts, and generally cause havoc of biblical proportion.
URLs Just Want to Have Fun: If you get on the net, you’ll see lots of talk about URLs. An URL is a Universal Resource Locator. It’s really meant to tell computers how to get around on the net, but it has ended up being used to tell people how to get around on the net.
Joy of Access: The Web: The World Wide Web—you may know it as “Netscape”, but you’re wrong—is the flashy part of the net. It’s not just text anymore. You’ve got pictures, and, if the site you’re going to is particularly progressive, you might see animation and hear sound.
Joy of Access: Gopher: Gopher is like the web that your grandfather used. It’s a lot simpler, and there’s none of this mucking about with making things look nice. Some gopher servers even run on IBM compatibles, replete with eight-character filenames. Try to find something useful in that murky swamp.
Bookmarks On The Web: If you do a lot of web browsing, you can get lost very easily. That’s what “bookmarks” are for. They allow you to keep a list of sites that you think you’ll want to come back to.
Joy of Access: Telnet: Telnet allows you to log into other computers. A lot of libraries, for example, still require you to “telnet” in to find the information you want. The Library of Congress is a good example. You can get to most MOOs and MUDs by telnet as well, if you haven’t got a specialized MUD client at hand.
Freedom of Press: The beauty of the Internet lies in the freedom it gives to individuals to publish to other individuals. In the eighteenth century the personal firearm revolutionized politics and encouraged the formation of the American republic. The computer is the rifle of the information age, and the personal computer will do the same thing to the clusters of informational power that the rifle did to clusters of political power. The twentieth century media…
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The more I learn about the Internet, the more I want to visit Finland. — Dr. Jack W. Pope

Contents of Negative Space™ as a whole Copyright © 1994-2024 Jerry Stratton. Individual copyrights remain held by their respective authors unless they specify otherwise. Site titles, such as Negative Space, Strange Bedfellows, Biblyon Broadsheet, Highland Games, and FireBlade Coffeehouse are trademarks of Jerry Stratton.

Joy of Access last modified December 18th, 2012.

Joy of Access

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