• Electronic Mail or e-mail. You can use the Net and other networks to send messages to your friends in Peoria or Melbourne—anywhere, in fact, where Internet connections go, from Alaska to the South Pole. An electronic mailbox is just like the physical equivalent. It’s a little storage area where your messages pile up for you to retrieve when you want. • File Transfer Protocol, or FTP. It’s a means to send or receive files from one computer to another. • Gopher. This program lets you track down information on the Net. The word _Gopher_ also alludes to certain Gopher-style collections of computer files. Different Gophers connect to each other through items on menus. You might start looking at an article on water pollution from a computer in Washington, D.C., see a mention of an African river, click on that menu choice with your mouse or otherwise select it, and end up at a computer in Johannesburg. • Internet Relay Chat. It’s like a huge party line except that people are typing rather than talking. You can open up private areas, too, and reach just one person. • Mailing Lists. To be a bit simplistic, they’re just like regular electronic mail, except that a number of people share messages, to which you can typically respond privately or with the entire list. Some lists, however, let only the _moderator_ send out messages. Via Usenet, some mailing lists appear as newsgroups. • Newsgroups. These are the bulletin board systems of the Net, in effect. Almost anyone can post messages there and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of people—far more than on most mailing lists, since people can read newsgroups without subscribing. The newsgroups are part of a service called Usenet, which reaches BBSs around the world, not just the Internet. No one owns this anarchy, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. • Telnet. Without leaving my regular keyboard I can operate a computer at Oxford University or the University of California by way of a procedure called Telnet. I’m remotely controlling the machines at the other end. • The World Wide Web. It’s the area of the Net that not only lets you read text but also see pictures, hear sounds, and even take in short clips from movies. Like Gophers, sites on the World Wide Web connect with each other. A program that lets you navigate the Web is known as a browser. Among the more popular browsers are Mosaic, Netscape, and Lynx (the latter, alas, won’t let you instantly enjoy pictures). Also, the Net, in the opinion of many, is mocking Orwell’s predictions (chapter 6: Governments and the Net: Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong). Some serious threats remain—such as the efforts of American bureaucrats to make the Net more friendly to snoopy cops—but 1995 is a long way from _1984_. What’s more, the Internet doesn’t offer just sex. Love, too, can thrive. The persistent may indeed find wives and husbands on the Net (chapter 7: The Electronic Matchmaker).