You've taken the big plunge, and jumped into the Information Superhighway!
Congratulations! Welcome to the Internet!
So what do you get for your Global Net Account? Where is all the free software, interesting news and lightning fast electronic mail? This is the biggest problem with the Internet. It is so vast, and so changeable that there is no central "index" of content like you might find on a commercial online service.
Global Net has constructed these pages to help you better understand the Internet, so you can get access to all the features you've heard about as fast as possible, and to tell you a little bit about the community you've joined by starting your Global Net Internet Account!
First, some background:
Several years ago, in an effort to streamline research and collaboration on the Internet, a bunch of computer scientists at CERN, the high energy physics lab in Europe, got together and invented a new document structure called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML does more than just contain plain text, it also defines a way to link to other documents, no matter where they are stored on the Internet. To HTML, a page stored on a computer in Burundi on the African Continent is just as accessible as a page in Bothell, Washington (motto: Welcome to Bothell, for a Day or for a Lifetime!).
Not long after HTML was introduced, another group of programmers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) developed a piece of software called Mosaic which could read these HTML documents and display them in an attractive format with visual cues and graphics to aid in the use of the various hypertext links on each page. These applications are called Browsers, and the software you are using to view this page is one of them!
Together, these two components (HTML and Browsers) form the World Wide Web. Due to the popularity of the Web, and the extremely simple format of HTML, virtually any type of resource connected to the Internet has been adapted or enhanced so that the Browsers can get at it. For most of its lifetime, the Internet has been arcane and difficult to utilize. It formerly required a substantial investment in time and effort to master. With the advent of the WWW, using the Internet has become as simple as point and click.
You're about to embark on the journey of a lifetime - in seconds you'll be viewing documents from all over the planet. To you, the World Wide Web will seem like a magical place where information is truly at your fingertips and the possibilities are limitless.
To start your voyage on the Internet, move your mouse pointer
to this icon and click