Part VI: The Internet

People have a hard time defining the Internet, because it's so huge and growing so quickly that almost anything that you might say can't be found on the Internet might well be on it by the time you finish your sentence. At its simplest, the Internet is the sum total of all the different networks which have been connected together. (Hence the name. If a collection of computers which are connected together is a "network", then a collection of networks which are connected together can be called an "internetwork", or, since people tend to shorten "network" to "net", an "internet.") The reason that this simplicity is lost is because the Internet has lots of computers in it, and more are being added all the time. As each new computer is added, the resources which are on that computer become available to anyone else on the net, and all the resources on the Internet become available to the user on that computer. Since different people use their computers to do different things, not only do more computers mean more resources, they mean more kinds of resources. Thus, as the Internet grows, resources become available which you or I might never have thought of creating in a million years.

Nevertheless, it is possible to divide the resources available on the Internet into types, depending on how you access them. In this section, we will discuss different kinds of resources on the Internet, and how you can use them.

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