Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 by Alex Brown, Richard Gordon, Shawn Harvell, and the University of Delaware. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to make and distribute not-for-profit copies of this guide provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved. The authors of this document have tailored it to the needs of certain classes at the University of Delaware. Therefore, permission to modify this guide for non-profit use is also granted as long as the above credits are included and the authors are notified, for their interest, of your use of the document. Any comments and suggestions, please Email alex@udel.edu.
University of Delaware
The History section of this guide was the work of Adam Gaffin, author of the Big Dummies Guide to the Internet, and was copied with the permission of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Inc.
Barry Johnson at Clemson University was very helpful in the development of this guide, as were the following: Bill McDonald, Jacob Andersen (Denmark), Daryl Kottek, Joseph Dougherty (University of North Florida), John Critchley (United Kingdom), Karen Fox (scu.edu), Joel Shurkin, Steve Lambert, Richard Keeves (Australia), Debra Gordon (Virginia Pilot/The Ledger Star), John Pena, Jason Noble (Australia), Eric Snyder, Michael Herron (University of Illinois at Champagne), Steven Garman (University Maryland, Baltimore), Ed Gregory, Chuck Winstead (University of Tennessee at Knoxville), Melinda Pfeiffer (North Carolina State University), Peggy Bottorff (University of Delaware) and V. Carter Broach (University of Delaware).
You will have heard many reports discussing the future of the information superhighway, but what does all this mean??
The purpose of this guide is to introduce you to the Internet and make your initial Internet experiences as pleasant as possible so as to encourage you to explore the Internet in more detail at a later time.
This guide will cover many facets of the Internet, certainly enough to make you a competent user, but it does not pretend to be an all inclusive document making you aware of everything that the Internet has to offer. Since the Internet is developing at an exponential rate and new Internet tools are being developed continuously, no printed document could achieve this. To illustrate this, the first edition of this guide (August 1994) did not include sections covering WWW, now a very popular Internet tool. Any attempt to be an all inclusive guide would create a case of information overload, thus defeating its purpose.
This guide introduces you to the Internet and takes a look at its short history. Section 2 discusses some of the tools that you will need to be familiar with to use the Internet. These discussions include examples that demonstrate the abilities of these tools as far as a business person is concerned, as well as their benefits to the classroom learning environment. Section 3 covers tutorials for each of the Internet tools discussed in Section 2. These tutorials give you a hands-on opportunity to perform tasks on the Internet and realize its benefits as quickly as possible.
