Name: The Internet for Dummies
ISBN: 9780764506741

What Hacker News says

jauntywundrkindSep 2024

I love Diamond Age and Void Star for speaking to some of the raised by internet/laptop-per-child dreams.

This opening up of horizons, connecting us to more, is something so unique & powerful.

Jimmy is talking about all the help & outsiders who pitched in, but I'd also say that this all-ness we can connect to has some of the least guidelines, terrible ability to orient oneself or understand or decypher it. Ateasy growing up Internet For Dummies was a book and covered a decent fraction of what we might find. Now that all society is here the guidebook to the internet it's use and it's dangers is vastly deeper.

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acjohnson55Sep 2023

I remember having AOL back in the very early web days, just after they added the browser. My dad had an "Internet for Dummies" book, which had a directory of websites to try. I, as maybe a 10 year old, could not properly type all the characters in the URL correctly and I gave up on this so-called World Wide Web. It seemed way worse than AOL-proper. Also, at that time, AOL had a much richer user experience than most of the early Web.

It was probably only like 6-12 months later that the web started to eclipse my usage of the proprietary AOL network. The ability for people to self-publish meant there was a lot more content for my hobbies of playing Civilization II and Battletech on the broader Web.

About 15 years later, I ended up working for AOL, via HuffPost, right through the Verizon acquisition. That was actually an extremely fun time to be there, as the company was attempting all sorts of experimental media projects, like HuffPost Live, Patch, their Aol Originals, etc. Completely coincidentally, my then-girlfriend (now-wife) worked for them through her PR agency, all the way through the Oath era.

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jimmygrapesJul 2020

I've never commented before so I had to make an account for this. Hopefully it doesn't get flagged, but that's the risk of lurking I guess. The rest of this post is anecdotal and perhaps fairly unusual, so forgive the lack of citations.

I'm 1995 I moved from Canada to the United States. Up until then I had been in the public school system since kindergarten. After 1995, I was "unschooled" from late 1995 to 2001, and I have to take exception to your idea that it is a privileged experience. I'll spare you the details but the summary is that my mom was more worried about the physical and mental abuse I encountered in public school (U.S. 5th grade, around 10 years old average and the first year of "middle school") at the hands of my supposed peers, primarily based on physical appearance and "foreign" + "new kid" status.

So after this very brief stint in American public school I was told by my mom that I would be doing "homeschooling" instead of getting my face rearranged for being white (whoops, spoiler).

Interesting fact: my mom had no idea how to homeschool. We had food stamps, sometimes, but usually it was just living off of combinations of flour, water, and salt. She became "religious" in order to get food boxes and a hope of networking to get work. We lived in rooms most of you would consider closets.

Her version of "unschooling" was to tell me that I need to learn math, science, history, and English, that way I could get a job when I grow up. She walked with me to the nearest library, and got me a library card, and told me (paraphrased due to memory): "read until you figure out what to do" her tone implying that I should learn the topics she mentioned.

I did. I also worked; I didn't have a computer at home (yet) but I knew how to use VCRs to record cable, and I could move furniture (even as a 10-11 year old), so my mom's church network got me a few dollars a week to save for myself. I saved up and bought a Commodore 64 from Goodwill after a big fight about "useless shit."

I taught myself BASIC, at first from a library book that showed how to draw Christmas trees and math problems (original leetcode I guess), then from the help files. When I wasn't doing that, I was reading science fiction. Absolutely no educational material.

My mom soon made enough to get a 386 Acer PC on credit, and I learned QBASIC with its infinitely more helpful help system. The computer had a modem and by late 1995 my mom had learned about ISPs from her friends at church. She called the owner of the local ISP and essentially traded me for internet access; I would go to their "office" (a repurposed shipping container) to answer tech support emails, and at home we could dial in for free.

This is where "unschooling" truly began. I had Microsoft Encarta that came with the PC, I had a book called Internet For Dummies, and I had virtually unlimited access to information.

I also ate once every 2 days, and it was rice and shitty meat more often than not.

I won't say where I am today, but I will say that it all worked out for the both of us.

Hope that helps someone.

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anelsonJul 2020

Thanks for sharing your story. I can relate to some of your experiences, although you definitely had it tougher than me.

She called the owner of the local ISP and essentially traded me for internet access; I would go to their "office" (a repurposed shipping container) to answer tech support emails, and at home we could dial in for free.

This is where "unschooling" truly began. I had Microsoft Encarta that came with the PC, I had a book called Internet For Dummies, and I had virtually unlimited access to information.

This was a breakthrough moment for me also. The local ISP offered shell or SLIP accounts, but SLIP was more expensive so I had a shell account. Mosaic was still buggy back then and it required the Win32s extensions to run on 16-bit Windows so I didn't bother. Gopher and FTP were the centers of my world.

My book was Navigating the Internet by Richard Gibbs.

Do you ever wonder if you would've ended up in the same place if you'd had an easier or more privileged upbringing? I'm convinced that most of my hardships growing up were essential factors in how I ended up. If I came up today with high speed Internet and a comfortable middle class life with a new smartphone every two years and a computer that I don't have to share with four other siblings, I might not have found the things that I'm so passionate about that I'll do anything just to pursue them.

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vram22Jun 2018

>I miss Usenet :-) Back in the day, any FAQ posted to Usenet was gold.

Got to agree (or most were, anyway). In an early company where I worked (large Unix hardware and software vendor), when I first got to know about FAQs and had Internet access in the office (initially via long-distance dialup to the head office), I must have spent tons of hours poring over many FAQs that I got by doing "ftp rtfm.mit.edu" and then going to the FAQs section, downloading and reading them.

I even bought a book about using the Internet (I think it was Internet for Dummies :), also bought Modems for Dummies, to learn how to use my dial-up modem at home with my PC) and from one of those books, found this great resource called "Accessing the Internet by Email". It had ways of doing searches and downloads (of Archie, Gopher, and FTP, IIRC) via email - there were proxy / gateway sites that let you do that - and getting the results in your email inbox. I must have used up a lot of bandwidth (of both kinds :) trying out most of those techniques and getting (and reading) many of those FAQs and other interesting tutorials, documents, etc. For multiple programming languages and other software topics, as well as other topics. It was huge.

Many of those FAQs are still available at www.faqs.org .

Also, just googled and found that the "Accessing ..." doc is still around. May still be useful to anyone who has limited Internet access or only email access, anywhere in the world:

Accessing the Internet by Email:

https://www.google.com/search?q=Accessing+the+Internet+by+Em...

2nd hit:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/

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dannnnnnnyDec 2012

Some of my findings:

The Internet for Dummies: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Internet-Dummies-Computers/dp/111809...

Wading The World Wide Web: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/keith+kyk...

This is what I'll go for: http://www.waterstones.com/waterstonesweb/products/john+naug...

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