The Internet For Dummies

This is one of my favourite finds! My mother's done some work with the local library, and I found this copy of The Internet For Dummies: Quick Reference, 4th Edition in their recycling bin once when I was tagging along and just had to rescue it to show to all the people on the Net. So without further ado, here are some photos of the book, with accompanying captions!

Here's the cover! I think this is one of the only published books I've seen that has ring binding instead of normal bindings, which is pretty interesting. This cover also reminded me that Eudora is a thing! And of course, they have the little Dummy guy in the corner.

Twenty-four years later, the receipt is still in the book! This book was bought from Best Buy on Armistice Day of 1998. Now, let's all take a second to marvel at those 1998 prices.

Here's an explanation of what the Internet is! Actually, this might still be useful nowadays, since people use computers and the Internet so much that some people just take them for granted and don't know how they work. Have all y'all heard that story about the university students who had to have their professors explain files and folders to them because they just put everything in one place? Also, I feel like the "anarchy at its best and worst" is still true, but only to some extent due to the corporatization of the Net and the predominant status of social media on the modern Web. But I digress.

Ah, back before "smart-phone" meant a soul-sucking, dopamine-producing, addicting little slab of glass. Those were the days... Also, I find the "network computers" mentioned here very interesting! They're almost like prototypes of Chromebooks.

A nice little list of emoticons! I've never seen some of these, such as the screaming or sarcastic faces. Also, it's weird that the semicolon means crying there instead of winking. I guess for crying today, we'd probably use T-T or something like that. I also wonder when the two colons for action markers switched to asterisks?

Apparently, it's super cool to have a home page. Not that I'd know anything about that, of course...

The whole "e-commerce is about to explode" thing is one of the main things (besides all the AOL and Netscape) to date this book, since it feels now like on-line shopping is the default, which is honestly sad. I much prefer buying things in person. Also, I feel like the "just for the fun of it" is the main reason somebody builds a site nowadays, especially if it's hand-made and not made in ye olde site builder with ugly, "modern and beautiful" templates.

Beyond that, it's really interesting to see the whole "you should be anonymous on-line" philosophy, since nowadays everything requires your full name and a photo of yourself to sign up. (I'm looking at you, Facebook and Quora!) I'm not too bothered about making sure I stay 100% anonymous, but I care more about it than I used to. I think I've done a pretty good job of concealing most of my personal info, however.

Another case of not giving out personal info. If I had a credit card, I feel like even now, I'd always be terrified of fraud and that kind of stuff, and I especially would be before modern on-line security! So yeah.

Anyways, that's some of my favourite pages of this book. I might add some more in the future.