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Well what is it then? Where did it come from? Is it really any good? As I’ve just started writing this column I’ll be going to go back to basics, so bear with me those of you are already in the know.
In ye olde days of the 1960’s most computer networks were set up with a large mainframe computer running lots of ‘dumb’ terminals. The mainframe gets bombed? Lights out. To avoid this, the American military looked at new ways of running the system and set up a new network. The American universities caught onto the idea - and the fact that they could communicate over long distances using the military’s (free) network.
The military eventually went their own way in the 80’s leaving the remaining network to research facilities and academic establishments, and slowly but surely the Internet became more of a public and international domain. So it’s ironic that this anarchic environment was born from a superpower’s paranoia during the Cold War.
On to the $64,000 question: What is the Internet?
It’s an international network of networks. A simple network is two or more computers joined together so they can share information, or resources. The Internet is made up of thousands of smaller networks all joined up together to make a very large one. Information in housed on computers called servers all over the world. That’s why no one owns or controls it. The responsibility for the content lies with each individual network controller and user, as cyberspace knows no boundaries. Information that is housed on a
server in say Holland may be illegal in the UK, but it is you that is committing an offence if you download it. It puts the responsibility back on the individual and with around 100 million people tapped into cyberspace, that’s a nightmare to control.
The first thing to realise is that the World Wide Web is just one of the applications you can use through the Internet, and has only been around since 1994. The World Wide Web is the ‘sexy’ part of the Internet, a multimedia application (text, graphics, sound, video) with a graphical user interface (you point your mouse at a link and click). It’s so funky that the other applications often get overlooked but can be equally as interesting, such as Usenet Newsgroups which you can access through your web browser
software.
Newsgroups are like a group of electronic notice-boards where anyone can read a message, and anyone can reply to it. Most are unmoderated and as with the rest of the Internet there is a lot of rubbish, but you can pick up some absolute gems of information. There are about 10,000 worldwide, divided by topic and covering a multitude of subjects. Whatever you are into there will be newsgroup discussing the subject closest to your heart. You can find out the answer to that question that’s been bugging you, or show your
encyclopaedic (or anorak-like) knowledge to the world.
You can usually tell the content by the name. For example: alt.music.jungle or uk.music.breakbeat are pretty obvious. Others might be a bit stranger such as those contained in the alt (alternative) section such as alt.commercial-hit.radio.must.die or the immortal alt.dont.get.even.get.odd. It can be a strange place to find yourself and the best advice is to lurk around for a while (read the posts without posting yourself) to pick up your nettiquette or (Internet ettiquette), to avoid getting flamed by a netnazi (an
abusive posting from a complete tit ).
There’s some sad people in cyberspace and it sometimes seems that a lot of them hang out in newsgroups, but there’s some top people too. The Internet is like real life in a lot of ways. Just in a more distilled form.
Helen Rees
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