The Secret Guide to Computers

Internet joy

A computer network is a group of computers (or computer terminals) that communicate with each other (by phone or other cables or wireless transmissions).

Now the most popular computer network is the Internet. It connects computers all over the world, by phone lines and by other communication methods that are faster. You can connect your computer to the Internet, so you can access computers all over the world, peek at their hard disks, and transfer their info to your computer. Now the Internet transfers games, news, photos, love letters, chitchat, ads, and globs of other info, public and private, to and from President Clinton, his successors, David Letterman, and many millions of other workers, jokers, kids, and kooks across the country and around the world.

You can use the Internet to send and receive electronic mail. You can also use the Internet to browse through announcements posted by folks worldwide.

The Internet gives you a huge sea of info. You stand on its shore, watch its many waves come at you, and get high by joyously jumping into those waves. That’s called surfing the Net, which means “browsing through the amazing info available on the Net”.

You’ll quickly get addicted to surfing the Net and spend many hours each day doing it. As you explore the Net, your electronic requests and their responses travel at electronic speeds around the world, on what Vice President Al Gore dubbed the Information Superhighway (I-way), propelling you through cyberspace (the vast, surreal world where all info and people are represented by bits, bytes, and electronic signals, as opposed to the “real world”, called meatspace, where people are composed of meat).

The Internet lets your mind fly around the world faster than a astronaut’s. Your friends will call you an infonaut or Internaut. Cynics will call you an Internut or Net-head. But no matter what folks call you, you’ll have fun, while learning more about the world than any pre-computer human could ever imagine.

How the Internet arose

The Internet arose because of the Cold War. Here are the details.…

Cold War research

Back in 1957, while the US was fighting the Cold War against Russia, the Russians launched the first satellite, Sputnik. That made the US military wake up and realize it was dangerously behind Russia in scientific research. In 1958 the US Department of Defense (DoD) reacted by creating the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which paid universities to do scientific research to help win the Cold War against Russia.

ARPANET

In 1969, ARPA created a clever computer network, called ARPANET, to let university computers send data over phone lines using a sneaky method that would work even if Russians bombed the phone lines.

The sneaky method was called packet switching.

It divided each computer message into many little packets and sent the packets over the phone lines intelligently: if a packet couldn’t reach its destination directly (because a phone line got bombed), the computer would sneakily switch that packet through different phone lines to different computers that would reroute the packet to its ultimate destination. At the ultimate destination, a computer would automatically make sure all the packets arrived, put them into the proper order, and make any lost (or damaged) packets be retransmitted.

At first, the ARPANET included just 4 computers: 1 at the University of Utah and 3 in California (at UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, and the Stanford Research Institute).

The next year (1970), ARPANET added 3 computers in Massachusetts (at MIT, BBN, and Rand). The next year (1971), ARPANET added more computers (in California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois), to make a total of 15 computers.

The next year (1972), ARPANET expanded to more parts of the country, so 2000 people were using ARPANET — and they were starting to have fun, since electronic mail was added to ARPANET that year. (Before that, ARPANET was just a big boring mass of technical documents & data.) The next year (1973), e -mail became so popular that 75% of all ARPANET transmissions were e-mails; and research institutions in England and Norway joined ARPANET, so ARPANET became international.

In 1979, the first newsgroups were created. (A newsgroup is a running discussion of facts and opinions, contributed by the newsgroup’s readers, so it becomes a gigantic collection of “letters to the editor about the other letters that were written”.)

On October 27, 1980, the entire ARPANET got shut down by a virus that was spread accidentally. Yes, a virus can accomplish what bombs cannot! Fortunately, the virus was eradicated.

Many universities around the world joined ARPANET because it was nifty, funded, and could be used for non-military purposes also, such as personal e-mail.

Split

ARPANET finally became too big to be managed simply, so in 1983 the military divided it into two networks:

One network, called MILNET, was strictly for use by military personnel (at military bases).

The other network, called “the new, smaller ARPANET”, was for civilian use (at universities).

To let those two networks communicate with each other, an inter-network communication method was invented, called the Internet Protocol (IP). That’s how the Internet began!

IP came in several versions, the most popular being the Transmission Control Protocol for IP (TCP/IP).

At the end of 1983, the Internet included about 600 hosts (computers that had permanent Internet addresses and could supply data to other computers). Afterwards, the Internet grew fast:

Year How many Internet hosts at end of year

1983 600

1984 1,000

1985 2,000

1986 6,000

1987 30,000

1988 80,000

1989 200,000

1990 400,000

1991 700,000

1992 1,000,000

1993 2,000,000

1994 5,000,000

1995 10,000,000

1996 20,000,000

1997 30,000,000

1998 40,000,000

1999 70,000,000

Let’s see why it grew so fast.…

National Science Foundation

In 1986, the National Science Foundation (NSF) wanted to let researchers share 5 supercomputers by using ARPANET, but NSF quickly changed its mind and decided to create its own network, called NSFNET. Like ARPANET, NSFNET used TCP/IP and was ARPANET-compatible, so NSFNET became part of the Internet. NSFNET ran faster than ARPANET (by running more phone lines between big cities, to form a strong Internet backbone), so universities switched to it from ARPANET. In 1990, ARPANET shut down permanently.

ARPA, which had created ARPANET, lived on but under its new name: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Why packet switching was practical

Though packet switching was invented as a way to avoid bombs, it turned out to have another advantage: it prevented any single user from hogging the Internet.

If a “bad guy” tries to hog the Internet by sending a long message, the Internet is smart enough to divide his message into many little packets. Other users are given a chance to squeeze their packets into the system without waiting for all the bad guy’s packets to go through. Any overloaded phone lines are automatically bypassed by routing some packets through other phone lines managed by other computers.

Packet switching made the Internet be “free for democracy” in four senses:

free from destruction by bombs

free from overload by user hogs

free from censorship by governments

free from big start-up costs (because government already paid for the backbone)

You can still wreck a country’s Internet if you’re evil enough to bomb all phone lines or send many long messages or force all Internet computers to censor transmissions. Though misguided folks tried such tactics, the Internet outlasted them.

Web

The Internet was just a tedious collection of documents, data, and e-mails until 1990, when an Englishman named Tim Berners-Lee invented a nifty Internet feature called the World Wide Web (WWW). To be briefer, folks call it just the Web. Here’s how it works:

It lets you view a document on the Internet and, if a word in the document is underlined, you can click on that word to get “more info” about that word. The “more info” can be a whole page of info about that word and reside in a different file on a different hard disk in a different computer in a different country; so by just clicking that underlined word, you’re suddenly accessing relevant info from a different computer in a different country. The person who invented the original document sets all that up for you, so by just clicking the underlined word you automatically access the info you want without needing to know what computer or country it’s coming from.

The World Wide Web turns a whole world of documents into a unified system.

In that system, each page can contain many underlined words. Clicking an underlined word transports you to another page (on another computer) that contains related info and in turn has its own underlined words that you can click on to get to other related pages.

The underlined words are called links, because they link you to other documents.

To invent the Web, Tim was inspired by Ted Nelson.

Ted Nelson was a US visionary who in 1965 had predicted that text would someday be connected worldwide by underlined links and called hypertext. Ted Nelson’s concept furthered what an earlier visionary, Vannevar Bush, had written in 1945.

Tim was the first person to take the ideas of Ted & Vannevar, apply them to the Internet, and make the whole system practical enough for humans to use.

Tim invented the World Wide Web while he was working in Switzerland at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, which at that time was called the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN). Afterwards, Tim moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he directs the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which plans the Web’s future.

War

The US’s allies copied Internet technology — and so did the US’s enemies:

In January 1991, during the Gulf War, the Internet’s ability to defend itself against bombs was proved in a strange way: Iraq’s own Internet helped Iraq’s military command network withstand attack from US bombs!

In August 1991, the Soviet Union was paralyzed by a news blackout during the coup against Gorbachev, but the truth got out to the world by Internet transmissions from Relcom (a small pro-Yeltsin Internet service provider in the Soviet Union).

Mosaic

To use the World Wide Web, you had to use a program called a browser. When Tim invented the World Wide Web, he also invented his own browser, which was crude. The first pleasant browser was Mosaic, invented in 1994 by Marc Andreessen, an undergrad at the University of Illinois’ NationalCenter for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Since his research was funded by the National Science Foundation, everybody was allowed to copy Mosaic for free.

Later that year, he left NCSA and formed a company called Netscape Communications Corp., which invented an improved Web browser (called Netscape Navigator) and sold it cheaply ($50 or less, per copy).

Mosaic and Netscape made the Web become much more popular. At the beginning of 1994, there were 600 Web sites (places on the Web that provide Web info); at the end of 1994, the number of Web sites shot up to 10,000; in later years, the number of Web sites continued to climb:

Year How many Web sites at end of year

1993 600

1994 10,000

1995 100,000

1996 600,000

1997 1,700,000

1998 3,700,000

1999 9,600,000

Mass market

In 1995, these events made the Internet suddenly become more popular:

Netscape Navigator version 2 came out. It worked much better than version 1.

Windows 95 came out. It handled the Internet much better than Windows 3.11.

Microsoft invented Internet Explorer. Like Netscape Navigator, it was based on Mosaic and initially sold for $50 or less. Soon afterwards, Microsoft began giving Internet Explorer away for free.

The World Wide Web reached a critical mass: enough good Web sites had been created to make browsing worthwhile for the average consumer.

Many training schools began offering crash courses in how to use the Internet.

Yes, 1995 was the year that the general American public got excited about the Internet.

That year, the Internet got too big for the NSF to fund. The NSF stopped running NSFNET but gave grants to help universities buy Internet time from commercial networks that had sprung up, such as Sprint, Alternet, and Performance Systems International (PSI). Consumers, sitting at home with their personal computers, could use the Internet by telling their computer modems to phone an Internet service provider (ISP), which was part of the Internet. Many companies sprang up to act as ISPs.

Before the Internet became popular, several old companies had invented their own networks for consumers by using a clever trick: they took business networks (which were busy in the day but idle in the evening) and offered them to consumers at low evening rates.

The first two such companies were Compuserve (owned by H&R Block) and The Source (owned by Readers Digest). After The Source went out of business, two other big companies arose: Prodigy (which was owned by IBM & Sears but later became independent) and America OnLine (AOL). AOL is independent. It’s bought Compuserve and now is merging with Time/Warner. When all those companies began, they expected consumers would mainly want online reference materials (computerized dictionaries, encyclopedias, and databases) but discovered consumers mainly just wanted to send e-mail and chat instead of doing “research”.

When the Internet became popular (because it included so many e-mail addresses and so many Web sites), those old companies modified their networks to include access to the whole Internet.

Those old companies and new ISPs weren’t sure how much to charge consumers. At first, they tried charging about $3 per hour. In 1996, a better standard developed: unlimited access for about $20 per month.

A few discount ISPs charged less. A few business ISPs charged more, for superior service. Later came free ISPs, which offered free Internet service in return for forcing consumers to watch ads while using the Internet; the advertisers pay for those free ISPs.

Who pays?

Here’s who invented and paid for the Internet.…

In the beginning, funding came from the Defense Department (ARPA) and the National Science Foundation. To invent the Internet, a lot of research was done by university professors (funded by government grants, student tuition, and alumni donations). A lot of research was also done by student volunteers, who wanted to be famous by being helpful.

When consumer ISPs became popular, many consumers paid $20 per month per household.

Many Web sites show ads, paid for by the advertisers. Those ad fees pay for the Web sites, the same way that ads pay for TV networks and newspapers.

Many businesses run their own Web sites, and pay for them in the hope that those sites will act as ads ( to draw in new customers and make old customers buy more). The businesses also hope their Web sites will show lots of info online, so the businesses don’t have to send brochures to customers and don’t have to hire customer-service departments to answer customer questions.

Many Web sites are created by new startup companies who dream of becoming great. Those companies convince investors to buy stock in that dream. Some of those dreamy companies will succeed, and their stockholders will get rich; other dreamy companies will fail, and their stockholders will lose their shirts. All those stockholders pay for the Internet and hope to reap rewards in return. While the stockholders wait for results, the company’s managers are paid high salaries (funded by stockholders), even though many of those startup companies haven’t earned any profit yet and never will.

In 1999, many such startup companies began; and investors sunk many millions of dollars into them, hoping the managers wouldn’t waste the money and would eventually turn a profit. A lot of jargon was invented to describe the situation:

A company whose Web site is its main fame is called a dot com (because its Web-site address ends in .com), and its employees are called dot commers. A Web site letting customers type credit-card numbers to place orders is said to do electronic commerce (e-commerce) and offer an electronic shopping cart.

A company selling mainly to consumers is called a business-to-consumer company (B2C company). A company selling mainly to other businesses instead is called a business-to-business company (B2B company). A company selling mainly to organizations who run Internet host computers (and helping those organizations improve their Internet computers and connections) is called an Internet infrastructure company.

An old-fashioned company (which ignores the Internet and runs just traditional retail stores in brick buildings) is called a real-world company and a bricks-and-mortar company. An ultra-modern company (which exists just on the Web and doesn’t bother staffing any storefront buildings where customers could walk in to buy goods) is said to exist just in cyberspace and be a pure-play Internet company. A company doing both — having brick-like retail stores (or warehouses) and also selling on the Internet (by letting customers use mice to click on what they want) — is called a bricks-and-clicks company.

If a startup company lures investors by telling an enticing story about how it could be profitable someday — but the company has no customers yet — its stock is called just a story stock.

Many Web companies are in San Francisco, where the managers are freaky-looking snotty kids who are young (under 30), wear nose rings, drive fancy cars, and got rich by inventing a story that got investors to give them millions of dollars, even though their companies haven’t made a profit yet and have hardly any customers yet and actually lose lots of money daily. Many of those Web companies have been buying office space in San Francisco (south of Market Street), encouraging landlords to jack up rents and kick out the poor people and non-profit organizations that were there before. People who resent those managers call them e-holes, dot snots, and dot commies.

Who uses the Internet?

When the Internet began, it was restricted to university scientific researchers, who were mostly men. But eventually the Internet grew, so people outside universities couass=RussFontBoldSmall>The world contains more women than men.

The World Wide Web grew to become a big worldwide library. “Reading in a library” appeals to women more than men.

E-mail grew to be a powerful force. Sending e-mail is like passing a note. “Writing, reading, and passing notes” are activities that appeal to women more than men.

Make sure your computer contains a modem. (Most new computers include the fastest kind of modem, which is called a 56K modem.) Unplug your home’s phone cord from your phone, and attach the phone cord to your computer’s modem instead, so your computer can make phone calls. Yes, you’ll be using the plain old telephone system (POTS). Tell your computer to phone a computer belonging to anInternet service provider (ISP), which charges you about $20 per month for the service, billed to your credit card. You might also have to pay a $25 start-up fee, though usually you’re offered a “special deal” where the start-up fee is waived, or the monthly fee is reduced to $18, or you get a bonus gift (such as a junky digital camera).

The phone number that your computer calls is called an Internet dial-in access number or point of presence (POP). Make sure the POP is a local phone number, so you don’t pay any long-distance bills. To make sure it’s local, ask your local phone company whether the POP’s phone number is indeed a free call under your calling plan.

While your computer is using the Internet through this method, your computer is “tying up the phone line”, so if any of your friends try to phone you they’ll get a busy signal. You can solve that problem in 3 ways:

Of all the standard-method Internet service providers, the one having the best reputation is EarthLink, based in Pasadena, California. It was started in 1994 by a 23-year-old guy named Sky Dalton, who ran a West Los Angeles coffeehouse, worked for ad agencies & computer-graphics companies, and was repeatedly voted one of the most influential technologists in the Los Angeles area. Now EarthLink is national, affiliated with Sprint, and has POPs in Canada and all states except Alaska and Hawaii. Its POPs are in over 1000 cities! EarthLink recently bought excellent competitors (such as MindSpring, JPS Net, and OneMain.com) so now EarthLink is even bigger and better. To chat with an EarthLink human who will help you get started, phone EarthLink’s sales department at 888-EarthLink.

Another big ISP is AT&T’s WorldNet, which charges a monthly fee of just $15 but limits you to 150 hours per month (extra hours cost 99¢ each). Unfortunately, WorldNet is often overloaded, especially its technical-support staff. IBM used to own an ISP called IBM Internet Connection, which had POPs in 52 countries, but sold it all to AT&T, so now WorldNet is even bigger! To find out about WorldNet, phone 800-WorldNet.

To save money, try a discount service. It’s the same as the standard method, except you pay just $10 per month (plus a start-up fee) and get worse service: more busy signals, more disconnections, more errors (saying “not found” or “Incorrect password”), and more difficulty reaching the tech-support staff.

That’s the kind of service I use, because I’m too cheap to pay for the standard method. I use a discount ISP called Galaxy Internet Services (GIS), which has POPs just on the East Coast (in NH, MA, RI, CT, NY, NJ, PA, MD, DC, VA, and GA).

To find out about Galaxy, phone 888-334-2529 or 617-558-0900. To find out about discount dealers in your area, check ads in your local newspaper and computer magazines and ask your local computer friends.

It’s the same as the standard service, except you pay slightly more (about $22 per month) and get a $400 rebate coupon (which you can use to buy computer equipment or office supplies) if you sign a 3-year contract. When you do the math ($22 per month, times 3 years, minus $400), your net cost turns about to be about $11 per month. That’s about the same cost as the discount method. Like the discount method, it gives you lousy service, and has the additional disadvantage of locking you into a 3-year contract, which you’ll regret a year or two from now, as better deals become available and you’ll be prohibited from taking advantage of them.

The main rebate ISP is MicroSoft Network (MSN), which has POPs in many cities. To sign up for MSN and get your $400 rebate, buy a computer at any retail-store chain, such as Radio Shack or Best Buy or Staples.

Another rebate ISP is Compuserve, which gives worse service than MSN and is too slow at mailing the rebates. Compuserve is owned by AOL and heavily advertised at Circuit City stores.

It’s the same as standard service, except you pay no monthly fee but must watch ads while you’re using the Internet.

That’s the method my stepdaughter uses when she’s living away from home, because she’s too cheap to pay even $10 per month. She uses the best such ISP, called BlueLight, which is funded by 4 companies (K-Mart, Yahoo, Spinway, and SoftBank). Its ads are at the bottom of the screen and unobtrusive. To start using it, you need a BlueLight CD-ROM disk, which you can get free at your local K-Mart store or by phoning 888-945-9255. When you insert the disk, it asks you personal questions about your shopping habits so it will show you ads that interest you. The only major nuisance with BlueLight is that it won’t let you use normal e-mail (such as Outlook Express); instead you must use a different e-mail system (such as Yahoo Mail).

Other ad-supported ISPs are Juno (whose ads are too big, 800-879-5866), Freei (whose ads are too flashy and distracting, 901-259-6600), and NetZero (which disconnects you if you don’t click any ads within 30 minutes, 805-418-2020).

It’s the same as standard service, except you use cable-TV wires instead of phone wires, get faster transmission (about 8 times as fast) and pay slightly more (between $30 and $40 per month for the service, plus $25 for an Ethernet card (a network card that you put into your computer), plus between $100 and $200 for a cable modem (which attaches the Ethernet card to a cable-TV cord).

Since this method achieves its high speed by using a broad spectrum of frequencies for transmission, it’s an example of broadband transmission.

I’d buy a cable modem for $200 ($250 minus $50 rebate) from Circuit City (a chain of electronics stores), then pay AT&T Broadband (AT&T’s cable-TV company) $30 per month. (If I order directly from AT&T without Circuit City, I pay instead $100 for installation plus $40 per month, which over the long term would cost more.)

Cable-modem service is available just if your neighborhood is wired for cable TV and your cable-TV service company is modern. To find out, phone your local cable-TV company and Circuit City.

A digital subscriber line (DSL) is a broadband transmission method that resembles the cable method; but instead of using cable-TV wires, it uses ordinary phone wires and makes them handle many frequencies at once.

The most common type of DSL is Asymmetic DSL (ADSL). It costs slightly more than the cable method: it usually costs between $35 and $45 per month. Usually, it works slightly slower than the cable method, but it’s popular because it’s more predictable: it’s unaffected by your neighbors’ usage. It’s popular for businesses, who are in business districts that haven’t been wired for cable-TV yet and therefore can’t use the cable method. DSL works fastest if you’re close to a telephone switching station; if you’re more than 2½ miles from a telephone-switching station, DSL works so slowly that the phone company will refuse to install it. The main complaint about DSL is that service technicians delay several weeks before showing up to install it, and you must take a day off from work to wait for them, and often they don’t show up on the scheduled day.

To find out about DSL, start by calling your local phone company. You can also order DSL service from standard-method ISPs (such as EarthLink at 888-EarthLink) and discount-method ISPs (such as Galaxy Internet Services at 888-334-2529).

It resembles the standard service but uses a satellite TV dish to supplement your phone line. To send a message to the Internet, use your phone line; when the Internet tries to send you a reply, the reply is sent by satellite instead of by phone, since satellite is faster.

How much does it cost? You start by paying about $300 (to buy a satellite dish and install it so it faces a satellite in the sky). Then you pay a monthly fee of $50 for unlimited use (or $30 for 25 hours). You’ll also want to buy a second phone line to avoid “tying up the phone line”. This service is financially attractive if you already bought a satellite dish to watch TV.

The main source of this service is DirecPC (owned by Hughes), whose dishes you can buy at your local Best Buy or Circuit City store.

It resembles standard service; but instead of using an ordinary ISP, you use an special ISP called America OnLine (AOL), which charges about $24 per month. The first month is free. Besides giving you Internet access, AOL also gives you its own services, such as AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), at no extra charge. But while using AOL, you must watch some extra ads, and some Internet features don’t work (such as e-mail MIME attachments). To find out about AOL, phone 800-826-6364.

It gives you free Internet access if you join a group. For example, if you buy a Gateway computer (by phoning 800-LAD-2000), you typically get a free year of AOL. If you use Qwest as your long-distance phone company and make a lot of phone calls (so you spend at least $50 per month), Qwest will act as your ISP for free. If you visit your local public library, you can use the library’s Internet-connected computers for free. While you’re enrolled in a typical college, you can freely use the college’s Internet-connected computers, which are in the college’s computer labs, libraries, and dorms.

Many parts of the Internet are overloaded: more people want to use them than they can handle.

When your computer’s modem tries to contact the Internet, the modem might encounter a busy signal or ridiculously long delay or a message saying a service is unavailable; you might get disconnected from the Internet or ignored or refused.

If your computer’s modem phoned a POP number, you can use the Internet awhile; but when you’ve finished, tell the modem to disconnect from the POP.

If you forget to disconnect, your ISP will eventually sense that no transmissions are occurring and will disconnect you automatically. The typical ISP will disconnect you if 30 minutes have elapsed without any transmissions.

If you’re running a business and want your computer to wait for incoming Internet messages continuously without being disconnected, ask your ISP for a business account, which costs more than a personal account. When an ISP advertises “unlimited access” for $19.95 per month, the ISP defines “unlimited access” to mean a personal account, used just a few hours per day, not waiting continuously for transmissions.

While you’re using the Internet, here are the most common reasons why you get disconnected: