The Internet was, as indicated, difficult to use in the beginning, requiring knowledge of telnet and the Unix command structure (not to be confused with the Telenet packet switching network). Telnet is a Unix utility that lets you remotely log into another host. Once you logged in, you had free reign of that system with two significant limitations:

• You had to have an account on the target system (in the early days most systems would let you log in as anonymous).

• You could only access the directories and files for which general user permission was granted.

This permission system was so clever that a user could be granted permission to see a directory and even run programs in it, but not be allowed to modify its content.

As indicated, when you found the file or program for which you were looking, you launched the FTP utility and downloaded it to your system. Searching for and finding things was difficult at best.

The next step in improving the utility of the information on the Internet was the development of Archie, which was designed at McGill University in Canada. Archie essentially indexed FTP sites. The target machine had to run the Archie server, while your machine ran the Archie client. The good part was that the Archie server was accessible via an Archie client, e-mail, or telnet. Archie was a great catalog on the Internet. Archie returned a list in Unix language that gave you host and file names...