• Internet Access Methods
  • The ways to access the Internet are many and varied. A few of the major ones inclued:
  • BBS - Bulletin Board System
    • Most BBSs are not on the Internet. However, the ones that are generally only offer e-mail access. Some notable exceptions to this rule are:
    • America On-line
      • AOL currently has over 1 million users
      • AOL was the BBS to first introduce the Gopher Client
      • AOL was the originator of the Usenet newsgroup in Spring 1994.
    • Prodigy
    • CompuServe
      • Compuserve first came on line in 1979.
      • In less than 20 years Compuserve has built a user base over 2 million users.
      • Compuserve was among first to offer Internet e-mail
  • SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
    • E-mail is far and away the most popular and most used feature of the Internet.
    • Over 20 million users of the Internet have only e-mail access. This is a very vast majority of the people considered to be "on the web".