Are you confused about the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet?

Internet mailing lists, called LISTSERVs, create the opportunity for two-way communication. Through e-mail, you can post messages or ask questions, and others will respond almost immediately.

Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) were a forerunner of today's Internet.

Bulletin Board Systems tended to be closed systems, which meant people had to dial in directly to the Bulletin Board (which also meant that BBSs tended to used by people from the local community). These dial-up services provided an electronic gathering place for people with similar interests, and included multi-player games, community news, information and chat.

Postal addresses allows people to send you physical documents -- what "netizens" call snail mail.

When you bought your computer, you probably used only the programs and files that were pre-loaded on your machine or those you bought and loaded from a disk or a CD-ROM.

The Internet has its own public bulletin boards, called Usenet newsgroups, usually shortened to newsgroups. On the wild frontier of cyberspace, newsgroups are a series of notes posted by interested users for anyone else to read.

With so many messages -- well into the millions daily -- passing through electronic mail systems, some consensus was needed to help keep things civil.

In a world before affordable fax machines, e-mail was a useful tool for researchers, academicians and government employees who needed to share reports, images, databases and other documents quickly and accurately.