The Online World resources handbook

The Online World: What is it? http://home.eunet.no/~presno/bok/2.html
The Online World resources handbook
Chapter 2:
The Online World
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This chapter is about the structure and contents of the online world. You will read about
Bulletin Board systems, discussion lists, conferencing systems, online databases, packet
data services, and network services like FidoNet, and the Internet.
Structure and contents of the
online world
Database producers and
information providers.
Online services
Gateways and networks
The services
Electronic mail
Services (contd.)
'Chat'
File transfers
Conferences and
discussions
News
Databases
Just for fun
From papyrus to bits and bytes
Services (contd.)
The user interface
The data transporters
and Internet
access providers
The user
Around 1500 B.C., the world's first library was set up in Tell el Amaran, Egypt. Eight
hundred years later, the first public library opened in Athens, Greece.
It took another two thousand years for the first full scale stored program computer
to be invented (The EDSAC. Wilkes, Cambridge, England. 1949), and for people to
express ideas like what Nikola Tesla said in an interview with Collier's, January 30,
1926:
,W LV PRUH WKDQ SUREDEOH WKDW WKH KRXVHKROG V GDLO\ QHZVSDSHU will be
printed 'wirelessly' in the home during the night.
Tesla was a famous Serbian electrical engineer and inventor, who devised among other
things the alternating current systems that underlie the modern electrical power industry.
He also did notable research on high voltage electricity and invented wireless
communication.
Incredibly enough, hypertext (used in World Wide Web documents) was proposed
as early as 1945 (by Vannevar Bush).
In 1954, the first online search service was launched by the Naval Ordinance Test
Station, in Michigan, U.S.A. Six years later, MEDLARS, a full text bibliographic
database containing references to medical literature was launched.
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