A Blast from the Past.... Top 10 Things to Know About the Internet

[moriah]

This was written back in.... oh, 1995 or 1996, by a user on a BBS that was very popular in my town. They partnered with another company to start offering dialup access to the Internet.

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Top Ten things get used to when surfing the Internet:

(1) Get used to a lot of aggravating waits. When you're on the Net,
you're hopping from node to node and you run at the speed of the
slowest site. If you have a stud connection (like my own, tce.net),
you should experience less netlag here than most other dial-ins.
When telnetting from ANYWHERE, however, the bigger the site the
more users and usually the worse the lag. If you are not a patient
soul don't even TRY telnetting to launchpad.unc.edu.

(2) Get used to change. If you're telnetting, you will find the
smaller sites tend to dissapear or change incarnations. If you're
ftping, you will find non-official file dumps get nuked a lot. If
you're reading Usenet groups, don't panic if your favorite one dies,
it may have just splintered into new groups due to popularity.
Luckily, there are people who can keep track of this for ya. Usenet
has an announce newgroup for new and changed groups, and other
resources such as Scott Yanoff's list can be found...look in
newgroups alt.internet and alt.bbs.internet for this and other info.

(3) Get used to Veronica. This search tool is my main entry point
into the net when I am searching for specific information. I usually
telnet to library.wustl.edu and then jump to their internet option
and from there to either the Well Gopher or the Nasa gopher. Go
to the "Search" option on either of these places and select one of
the Veronica servers. Veronica will search cyberspace for your
keywords. It doesn't always help, but I have been surprised...

(4) Get used to not knowing what the hell you are doing. It seems
like each telnet site has a different interface, and even then they
change from time to time. A passing knowledge of Unix or Vax helps.
There is some commonality, but be prepared to face a learning curve
each time you try a new site.

(5) Get used to lurking on the newsgroups before posting. Some say
for week or two...I'd recommend closer to a month. If it is your
first venture into news, you will probably need at least a week
just to learn the jargon and abbreviated words. If you have a
general question, pull the FAQ (which will appear in the group
periodically) and read it before you ask even the most basic
question. If you have a specific question, I would recommend
e-mailing a frequent or knowledgable contributor to the group and
asking the question. If they can't help you, they can probably give
you some advice in how to format the question. If they are a
prolific poster, chances are they LIVE for this kind of crap.

(6) Get used to hostility. There are a lot of friendly and helpful
people out there, but there are also a lot of jerks. As a faceless
medium, the Internet is host to a lot of aggressive nitwits who are
extremely brave when squaring off against a silent screen. Whatever
you do, DON'T RESPOND TO FLAMES! You'll just aggravate the situation.
Trust me, you never win a fight with these buttheads, and even if you
do they rarely realize they've been beat. It just ain't worth it.

(7) Get used to a little bit of a letdown. If you've followed the
hype on the internet, you probably think you can do everything from
reading best sellers to ordering lawnmowers. The fact is, the Net
ain't that well connected yet and a lot of the services are either
primitive or non-existant except in some marketer's dream world.
Now, there is a lot of cool stuff, and more and more commercial
ventures are getting wired, but don't expect TOO much....yet.

(8) Get used to a surfeit of information. Many newsgroups get more
traffic in a day than you could reasonably be expected to read.
Searches on keywords usually turn up 37 copies of the same paper
from some academic journal which has no bearing on what you want
to know. FTP sites are likely to have 18 different incarnations of
an arcane utility you don't need (and if you do need it you will
find it for every operating system but yours). Agents to filter
this traffic aren't readily available yet, so until then prepare
yourself to wade through a LOT of net spam to get to what you want.

(9) Get used to super-specialization. The Internet seems to have
a fascination with minutiae. This, combined with the aforementioned
surfeit of information, can make it VERY hard to see the forest
for the trees. For every byte of generic useful data on the
Internet there are another seven bytes of data on obscure subjects
or fringe groups or sub-specialities of specialities. You have a
thin line to tread here: the general fonts of information usually
spew too fast for you to drink, and the most specific are sometimes
either dead or too specific to be of use. Like I said before, either
wait for software agents to evolve into usefulness or resign yourself
to long and sometimes unrewarding searches.

(10) Once again, get used to change. By the time you read this
Top 10 list, it will probably be out of date. Anything you read in
print or see on TV is already old hat. The net gurus scoff at
the "latest and greatest" in _Wired_ magazine. Find a couple of
reliable and frequently-updated information sources online and use
them to keep up. The Internet evolves at a frenetic pace, and unless
you make a constant effort to keep up it will scream past you.

This should give you a fairly poor overview of what to "look out for"
on the Internet. It may seem a little defeatist, but you need to
realize that the Internet isn't just a magic window you can point and
click on to get all your questions magically answered and all your
term papers magically written for you. Once you get past these
difficulties (which really are minor to anyone either moderately
intelligent or determined), you will find that the Net is a pretty
cool place to be. Happy surfing!

]:-) ([e-mail])

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So, how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same?

[KamaAina]

1. Telnet?

What is that? Some obscure cable channel? :P

[XemaSab]

2. And get used to walking five miles uphill in the snow

BOTH WAYS!

And get off my lawn! :o

[InvisibleTouch]

3. #6 has definitely stayed the same!

The rest of it ... well, let's just say there's some terminology on that list that I vaguely recall from my ancient and primitive ventures onto the net. ;)