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The Whole Internet

Photo: Axel Dürkop

Recently I found a long buried treasure at the flea market of my university’s library: The Whole Internet1. The book was published in 1992 and explains the best features of the Internet. That is in regard to the table of contents:

  • Remote Login with Telnet
  • Moving Files with FTP
  • Electronic Mail
  • Network News
  • Finding Software with Archie and Telnet
  • Finding Someone with Finger and in Usenet
  • Gopher
  • Indexed Databases: WAIS
  • WWW (!)

It’s fun to read the book as it takes you back into the years when it was not clear what the internet and the WWW would become. Thus the book starts with a quote by David J. Buerger who was Editor at Communications Week that time:

The Whole Internet User’s Guide & Catalog will probably become the Internet user’s bible because it provides comprehensive, easy instructions for those who want to get the most from this valuable electronic tool.

Krol, the author of The Whole Internet, in 1987 published The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet which can be found on Project Gutenberg.

In 1992 I was still at school. I played in a band and just quit working on my Commodore 64 all night long. My first contact with “this valuable electronic tool” was in 2000 when I started doing research on the net and downloaded songs from Napster.

What did you do in 1992 on the Internet and WWW?


  1. Krol, E. (1992). The Whole Internet. User’s Guide & Catalog. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly & Associates. ↩︎