| The Internet really hit the headlines in 1994. People started talking about it, newspapers started writing articles about it, and those weird-looking addresses full of dots and dashes started popping up at the end of TV shows and adverts. Ah yes, everyone said, knowingly. Hype. It’ll be something different next year. But something unexpected happened…
Unlike most other objects of media hype in recent years, after the dust has settled, millions of people are still using the Internet every day – for entertainment, for business, for leisure, to communicate with others, to learn or research, to buy goods, the list is almost endless. And every day the number of people using the Internet grows by thousands. If these people weren’t finding it useful or enjoyable, that number would instead be getting smaller.
These people can’t all be computer whiz-kids either, can they? In fact, you don’t have to be a technical genius to use the Internet. As long as you’re reasonably comfortable with using a PC and Windows, it’s no more tricky than anything else you use your computer for. That’s the thing that really happened in 1994: although the Internet has been around since the 1960s, in 1994 software that made it friendly and easy to use started to appear.
But that’s history, and I’m not going to bore you with lengthy history lessons, or throw a lot of impressive but unnecessary jargon at you. The aim of this book is twofold – first, to help you connect your computer to the Internet and find your way around it, and second, to point you towards the practical, useful, or just plain fun things that the Internet has to offer. |