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And on the 8h day...

A short outline of the history and lingo of the Internet. Hold on--there are more three-letter acronyms than you can handle without sedatives.

"Plastics." That was the one word that some old fart offered to Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate." Over the break, some drunk computer geek offered a similar piece of advice: "Bandwidth."

As the Internet, most currently the World Wide Web, expands at an enormous pace, and as businesses begin to find ways to conduct transactions, most people will have to possess a working knowledge of the Internet. According to probably no one but me, here's the skinny on what you should know.

DARPA is not just a fancy coffee house in Seattle. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency was responsible for setting up computers all over North America. They were linked together over "phone" lines so in the event one computer went down because a Russian nuclear missile hit it, we could fire back because our computers weren't giving us "Fatal Error" messages.

"So how can I communicate with friends over e-mail without paying long distance charges if that's how the computers are connected?" The computers that make up the Internet link up over what are called leased phone lines. The bigger computers, called servers, that handle a lot of data connect to several other computers over these lines, making what we know as the Internet.

The people running the computer servers pay only for having the line there for their exclusive use. The amount of information relayed over that line is completely irrelevant to that cost. So one computer hooks up to another computer 50 miles away, then that one to another one, and so on until you're sending e-mail to your buddy in Zaire.

If you really want to get into how it works, take CIS 120 and badger your GTF about it.

"So where is the Internet going to be in five years?"

No one knows for sure, but you can bet it will offer a lot more advanced features, and be simpler to use. That's the way things always go with computers. Make it cool, then make it easy.

The first computer took up most of a warehouse and required about 50 people to operate. Incidentally, the term "bug" for a computer error probably derived from this computer whether the lights attracted moths and got caught in the tubes.

Later, Bill Gates and Paul Allen came up with an operating system that was, for the age, easy to use, cheap and worked with most machines.

Xerox later came up with the Graphical User Interface (GUI, pronounced "gooey") and made computers really easy to use. Apple Macintosh picked up on the idea and ran with it when Xerox stumbled.

Tim Berners Lee, a physicist, came up with the World Wide Web as a way of more quickly harnessing the immense knowledge of scientists.

Java is a newcomer to the Internet, and a lot of people are screaming about how cool it is. Personally, I don't think it will take too quickly because it's only in its sexy, not easy, stage. It currently requires too much programming skill to use.

Bank on this, though: If the computer industry doesn't work on its security, the Internet will go nowhere. In the last few months there have been some improvements to security, but they are not widely available.

Until that security is widely established, the Internet will be nothing but a big encyclopedia and coffee shop without the caffeine.