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It's a Big World in Here

© Laura Brown

Welcome to the Internet. The place where Jane in Sydney can talk to Dick in Saskatoon for hours and it won't leave her with a massive phone bill. It's also the place where you can find anything and if you can't find it, you can create it yourself, then meet a dozen people who share your interest. You can make a name for yourself here. But, where do you start?

The Internet is so big it's like finding yourself in a fun house. All the doors look interesting but one might go on forever, one might have a booby trap and one takes you exactly where you want to go. To get where you want to go you need to read the map. To read the map you need to know what the map is talking about. In short, you need to know the terminology.

An ISP is your Internet Service Provider. That is the company you pay to hook you up online and give you an email address. Email, electronic mail, is the way you will be exchanging letters on the Internet. The web (WWW - World Wide Web) is the place you find websites and just about everything you can imagine. Later, you can add your own personal pages to the Internet.

That's not all you can do online. Likely you have heard about chatting. One method is on the web, on a website, using your web browser. There is another way, it's called IRC (Internet Relay Chat). For IRC chatting you will need different software, mIRC is the most popular.

The last big area of the Internet for you to explore is Usenet, also known as newsgroups. Although they are not part of the web you can read the newsgroups with most web browsers. In the early days of the Internet you would have downloaded a news reader, like Free Agent. The newsgroups are a vast network of message boards, accessible to people all over the world. It's like chat but you have to wait longer to hear back from people and they call the messages, posts.

Each area of the Internet used to need special software for you to access them. Now, the main thing you need is called a web browser. Lets back track just a bit. Software is a program (from a CD usually) you load into your computer. Hardware is the stuff you can actually, physically, touch like your keyboard, mouse and monitor. Back to software. There are different types of software: freeware, shareware, adware, spyware, demos and full versions. It's not as complicated as it sounds. If you go shopping for software, freeware is free to use. The rest are trial versions or you look at advertising while you run the software.

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