A Wondrous Introduction to the Internet (Part 1 of 300)

PREPARE for a voyage of electronic proportions at the speed of sound! I am Digitalario Futurebits, your humble tour guide through the newly opened World Wide Web. Your navigator of this netscape, if you will.

Please watch your step as you descend the staircase into computer hell.

May I ask your name?

Cypher Raige. It's a clever name because if you look up Cypher it means "stand-in for the audience", which I am, and when you think about it Raige sounds sort of tough and cool.

Lovely! I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of that definition so I won't look it up, and I urge others not to as well.

Now, let's begin our years-long journey by defining what the internet is. Follow me to a vantage point where we can see the entire thing.

There it is.

Think of the most powerful Compaq or Gateway computer you can buy at Circuit City with your Holy Roman Empire coins. Now imagine thousands of those computers - all with their turbo buttons pushed in, all running the most expensive performance-boosting software, all connected to one another with phone lines.

That's the world wide web. Scientists created it to type math at one another when they were too far apart to yell effectively. Soon it evolved into a virtual grid of cybernetic information. Now that the digital gates have opened to regular folk like you and me, ANYTHING is possible.

Let's zoom in to the next stop on our tour.

What's going on here? It looks like my living room - after a crazy party! Haha.

Ah, we've stumbled onto the Web Page Room. This is where all the completely random 1s and 0s floating around in the network are converted into actual information then zapped into something that looks like a book or magazine page.

How on earth - or perhaps I should say cyber earth - does one read such a page? What stops all the pages on the internet from spilling onto my screen at once and making my eyes bleed?

The answer is this, the friendly web browser. Think of it as Notepad.exe for the digital age.

As you can see, a web browser sends out thousands of minions from Local Machine (your computer) to WWW.NET (the internet's home address) to pick up web pages and deliver them onto your computer screen. The process is flawless because it strictly uses the most pleasant aryans.

Fascinating! You mentioned that the world wide web uses phone lines. Tell me, is it possible to communicate with other people on the internet like I do on the phone?

Does the scene before us answer your question?

Absolutely.