Chances are you know someone who is hooked into the Internet, or, as experienced users like to call it, "The Net."
You usually can spot them in your workplace. They're the ones with bleary eyes from staying up all night in front of their computers.You may even have noticed the strange numbers and symbols that appear more regularly on the bottom of business cards - Internet E-mail addresses. For example, President Clinton's address is president@whitehouse.gov.
But chances are, you have no idea what it all means.
The Internet is a vast unorganized link of computers and data bases worldwide. Using it, anyone with a personal computer and a modem can browse through libraries in Tokyo, Stockholm or other corners of the world, look at weather satellite photos from faraway places or even type messages directly to people they may never meet in person. From Australia to Russia to the person on a computer next door, users can join discussion groups on topics ranging from religion to subjects too raw to mention in a family newspaper.
Most commercial information services, such as CompuServe, America Online and Prodigy, now allow their users to send messages through the Internet, hence the Internet addresses on business cards. But full access to the Internet - the kind that allows the user to look at files and participate in all discussion groups - requires special access.
So far, an information service known as Delphi is the only large commercial company offering such access through local telephone numbers, although many smaller services offer it for a fee plus long-distance charges. American Online and other services are promising expanded Internet services, however.
This emerging web of on-line computers has already spawned strange incidents.
In Virginia last month, a college student was credited with saving the life of a suicidal Denver woman with a computer. According to the Associated Press, Chris Glover read a plea for help from the woman on an Internet chat line. He kept typing messages to calm her. Eventually, the woman revealed she was in the University of Denver engineering building. Glover then called campus security in Denver, and officers took the woman to a hospital.
The Internet began as a service to link government computers. It gradually expanded to include university systems, and only within recent years has it become accessible to the general public. Because of its origins, and because it is a loosely knit collection of services and not owned by anything or anyone, the Internet can be extremely difficult to learn and maneuver.
Several books are available to guide the novice. One of the best known is "The Whole Internet Users Guide & Catalog" by Ed Krol, published by O'Reilly & Associates in Sebastapol, Calif.
Another popular one is "A DOS User's Guide to the Internet: E-mail, Netnews, and File Transfer with UUCP" from Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference Books in New York.