Teach Yourself the Internet in 24 Hours

This is my favorite book right now: Teach Yourself the Internet in 24 Hours by Noel Estabrook and Bill Vernon. This book has 24 proven one-hour lessons that will teach you the internet. It was written when the internet was capitalized as The Internet back in 1997.

I love this book for a few reasons:

  • It’s nice to be reminded of a simpler time for the internet. The internet was a new, fun place back in the 1990s and it got really complicated after that. Now, the internet means everything and nothing at the same time. The internet is not a thing anymore, it is everything.
  • I love the word cyberspace. Cyberspace is a concept “describing a widespread interconnected digital technology.” We used to say cyber a lot back then. Cybercafe. Cyberwar. Cyberpunk. The cyber prefix is making another comeback and is having another twist in its bizarre history.
  • It’s great to read some about something you think that you know a lot about but written about in a nontechnical way with explanations. The book makes mention of Internet Service Providers or ISPs and at some point, I stopped using that phrase. Are there still ISPs out there? This book pre-dates Google so it talks a lot about online research, newsgroups, and file transfers, and e-mail (e dash mail for emphasis). Back in those days, you were were an online researcher when you tried to find something. Something like an investigator. Things were hard to find and you had to stitch together all of the info to build a Frankenstein body of knowledge. Now, the Google is efficient. It’s so good that it is trying to figure out what I want before I even ask for the data.

If you get some time, take a moment and reflect on something you first experience when you were younger and see how it has changed. Does it matter? What things used to occupy a lot of space in your head but just don’t anymore. It is fascinating going through all of this accelerating change. Most of it feels pretty natural but I do wonder about when it will move faster than I can tolerate and when I will draw a line and say, this is what I know and this is not something that I want to know or be a part of.

“If you want to not only bring somebody up to speed on the mechanics of Internet use but also provide them with a true understanding of the Internet, [Teach Yourself the Internet in 24 Hours] makes it easy.”

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