Foreword
By Mitchell Kapor,
Co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Welcome to the World of the Internet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is proud to have sponsored the 
production of EFF's Guide to the Internet. EFF is a nonprofit 
organization based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to ensuring that 
everyone has access to the newly emerging communications technologies 
vital to active participation in the events of our world.  As more and 
more information is available online, new doors open up for those who 
have access to that information.  Unfortunately, unless access is broadly 
encouraged, individuals can be disenfranchised and doors can close, as 
well. EFF's Guide to the Internet was written to help open some doors to 
the vast amounts of information available on the world's largest network, 
the Internet. 

The spark for EFF's Guide to the Internet, and its companion MIT Press 
book version, Everybody's Guide to the Internet, was ignited in a few 
informal conversations that included myself and Steve Cisler of Apple 
Computer, Inc., in June of 1991.  With the support of Apple Computer, EFF 
engaged Adam Gaffin to write the book and actually took on the project in 
September of 1991. The guide was originally published electronically in 
July of 1993 as the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet. 

The idea was to write a guide to the Internet for people who had little 
or no experience with network communications.  We intended to post this 
guide to the net in ASCII and other formats and to give it away on disk, 
as well as have a print edition available.  We have more than realized 
our goal.  Individuals from as geographically far away as Germany, Italy, 
Canada, South Africa, Japan, Scotland, Norway and Antarctica have all 
sent electronic mail to say that they downloaded the guide.  EFF's Guide 
to the Internet is now available in a wide array of formats, including 
ASCII text, Windows Help, World-Wide Web, PostScript, and AmigaGuide.  
And the guide is finally available in a printed format, as well. 

You can find the electronic version of Everybody's Guide to the Internet 
by using anonymous ftp to ftp.eff.org and accessing 
/pub/Net_info/Guidebooks/EFF_Net_Guide/netguide.eff. Or send an e-mail 
message to info@eff.org.  The electronic version is updated on a regular 
basis with a newletter (/pub/Net_info/Guidebooks/EFF_Net_Guide/Updates/), 
and occasional new versions of the guide itself. 

EFF would like to thank author Adam Gaffin for doing a terrific job of 
explaining the net in such a nonthreatening way.  We'd also like to thank 
the folks at Apple, especially Steve Cisler of the Apple Library, for 
their support of our efforts to bring this guide to you.  Finally, we'd 
like to thank our publishers at MIT Press, especially Bob Prior, for 
working out an arrangement with us where we can continue to distribute 
the text in electronic format and forego our royalties in order to keep 
the price of the book low. 

We invite you to join with EFF in our fight to ensure that equal access 
to the networks and free speech are protected in newly emerging 
technologies.  We are a membership organization, and through donations 
like yours, we can continue to sponsor important projects to make 
communications easier.  Information about the Electronic Frontier 
Foundation and some of the work that we do can be found at the end of 
this book. 

We hope that EFF's Guide to the Internet helps you learn about whole new 
worlds, where new friends and experiences are sure to be yours.  Enjoy! 

Mitchell Kapor
Chairman of the Board
Electronic Frontier Foundation
mkapor@eff.org

QUERIES:  Please send all queries regarding EFF, and availability and
distribution of the guide to ask@eff.org, or one of the other EFF addresses
above.  Please send all updates, corrections, and queries regarding the
content of the guide to the author, Adam Gaffin, at adamg@world.std.com.