Welcome to the world of the Internet! It is our pleasure to provide you with the information and means to become one of the many people today taking advantage of the endless opportunities of communication, education, recreation, and global marketing the Internet has to offer. As your Internet Service Provider (ISP), we take great pride in providing you with the kind of service you expect. We are constantly working to see that Ford Publishing and the 2 Fords Network is a state-of-the-art facility, offering the latest features, supported by an experienced and knowledgeable technical support staff, with a commitment to user-friendly personal service in all we do. The New Users Agreement gives you the legal version of what to expect from the 2 Fords Network.

Unlimited Access, NOT Unlimited usage...

Our PPP (point-to-point protocol) access account pricing is based on unlimited access. This does not mean you can leave your computer connected to the internet 24 hours a day. The term unlimited access does not mean unlimited usage, it mearly means you have total access to all areas on the World Wide Web for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While it is NOT our policy, I have heard of many large market providers that define unlimited as 4 hours a day. With 2 Fords Network, as long as there is an empty modem, you can stay connected as long as you want. What you must remember is, when you are on the Internet, you are on a "party line" with as many as 9 other customers waiting for you to log off, so they can log on. In our base rate plan, customer-to-modem ratio is designed to never exceeds 10:1. In addition, all components integrated at our facility are state-of the-art and manufactured by the leaders in communication system equipment, such as U.S. Robotics, Adtran, Ascend, Lucent, Livingston, Rockwell, and Diamond Supra. Many times I am asked if our system has kicked someone off the net. The answer to that is most likely not. There are so many reasons why you will be bumped off the net I do not have the space to discuss them here. You will find some of them in other technical discussions elsewhere in this NFO section. There is only 2 things the 2 Fords Network Server will disconnect you for. One is when your computer has been idle for more than 20 minutes. Our server assumes that you left and forgot to turn your computer off.

Features found ONLY at Ford Publishing On-Line and the 2 Fords Network... POWER and SPEED are tops on the list at the 2 Fords Network. Our POWER comes from our fully secure Macintosh G3 and G4 Servers. No one has faster servers in our area.
Our SPEED comes from our connection to the internet, including T1-T3 connectivity from our facility to the backbone. Our Digital modems combined with our T-1 and fiber optic T-3 connections ensure you the highest internet standards. No one in the area is faster

A Word About Speed....

Although modem access at 26 to 28 is standard for the majority of today's users, our high speed connectivity is another example of our commitment to provide customers with the latest in Internet technologies. If you have a slow connect speed, you can be sure it is not because of our equipment. Our PPP access is designed to accommodate the highest speeds allowable by the FCC (up to 56k modems). Unfortunately, 56K downloads are not possible with current analog phone lines. ( for more 56k NFO, hit the link at left) 2 Fords Network's fully digital equipment and fiber optics backbone connections coupled with matching modem to modem dial-ups, give you the best connect speed your local analog telephone lines will permit, even on the digital modems. The only thing we can't do here at The 2 Fords Network is run a direct line from us to your location. We are all limited only by the quality of the phone lines in our own neighborhoods. The area where you will notice a measurable difference is in what is called the "transfer rate" or "download time" which has to do with how long it takes a site to come into your computer, and how long it takes to move from site to site. According to independant tests, no one in this area beats the 2 Fords Network download speeds.

We'll start at the very beginning. Before you know it, everything will be crystal clear. And we promise, you won't feel a thing ... I've included a glossary so you can keep up with all of the terminology.

A Short History Lesson.....No, Dan Quale didn't do it!

People think the Internet is "new." Truth is, the foundations for the Internet were built as far back as 1957, as a response to the USSR's launch of the Sputnik (the first artificial earth satellite). The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed within the Department of Defense (DOD) to establish a US lead in science and technology applicable to the military. The agency's goal was to allow computer scientists and engineers working on military contracts to share expensive computers and other resources. During the next several years, DOD funded research into networks and packet-switching technology.

The Internet came into existence in 1969 with the birth of ARPANET, commissioned by DOD for research into networking. DOD wanted to create a network that would not be vulnerable to nuclear "decapitation;" in other words, specifications mandated that the network should not be centrally managed, and should link an unlimited number of computers without relying on any single computer to play traffic cop. By the end of the year, ARPANET could boast four hosts: University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University, University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

The embryonic Internet's growth was modest at first. At the end of 1971, the network comprised 23 hosts. Not until 1984 did the number of hosts exceed 1,000! But, by 1987, the number of hosts exceeded 10,000; in 1989 there were more than 100,000 hosts; and 1992 saw the number of hosts exceed one million. As of January, 1996, there were 9.5 million hosts on the Internet, connected through more than 94,000 networks, representing 96 countries. How's that for fast growth?

Catalysts for Growth.....

The Internet remained the stronghold of the government and academia through the late 1980s. Then, three factors joined to drive what has become one of the fastest growing phenomena in human history:

On the consumer front - PCs had made computers affordable at the household level; modems came along and allowed individuals to connect to commercial on-line services and BBSs over regular telephone lines. Thousands connected to these services, but the virtual communities created were essentially closed from the rest of the world.

On the commercial front - a networking revolution was taking place in corporate America. Throughout the 1980s, businesses were busy replacing mainframe terminals with PCs. This caused individual employee productivity to soar; however, it left companies without an effective way to share data and devices such as printers. Thus, local area networks (LANs) were born. They consisted of a bunch of PCs connected by wires. LANs changed the way corporate America worked by institutionalizing e-mail, establishing an easy, effective and inexpensive method of communications. Wide area networks (WANs) were created to connect branches and subsidiaries. But again, these networks represented closed systems - closed from the outside world. And the proliferation of different software and hardware standards among different companies made it a virtual nightmare to integrate the LANs and WANs into larger networks. In 1979, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was brought on board. The NSF is a civilian agency. NSF used the Internet to connect its super computer centers, as well as to network government and academic researchers. In 1986, NSFNET was created as a dedicated backbone running at 56 Kbps.

The NSFNET backbone was upgraded to a T-1 in 1988 (1.5 Mbps), and again to a T-3 in 1991 (45 Mbps). By the late 1980s, the NSF was footing most of the bill to keep the Internet running. The NSF allowed companies to connect to the Internet, but purely commercial communications were forbidden. In March, 1996, the NSF relinquished all control of NSFNET to a consortium of Internet providers. Today, the NSF no longer funds the backbone; instead, it is developing an independent network, intended to serve the scientific and research community. Hmmm.

Spontaneous Combustion .....

Commercial networks such as Prodigy and Compuserve were among the first to capitalize on the golden opportunity that emerged as NSFNET was formed. As commercial restrictions were eased, more and more networks were connected to the backbone, or to other networks already hooked to the Internet. The NSF provided the solution that all those service providers (such as individual networks, on-line providers and BBSs) had been waiting for. And best of all, for a long time, all of this was provided for free to the service providers. During these years, the providers began charging for e-mail (past a set number of messages), even though they had no expense associated with delivering those messages. More recently, competition eliminated these types of extortionist practices.

Even as the Internet expanded and hosts proliferated, the Net (as the Internet is called among dedicated users) was still mainly the domain of geeks and freaks. Most users did not (could not ...) do much more than send and receive electronic mail, and maybe FTP a file or two. Even these simple tasks should have been considered great accomplishments to the uninitiated. The Internet was not created to be user-friendly. It was as archaic and unin-tuitive as you can imagine. (Remember "C:\" ? Think even less friendly!) But soon this would all change ...

Make it Simple.....

As all truly great inventions go, the Internet wasn't meant to happen. The Economist has coined it "The Accidental Superhighway." What brought the Internet to the corporate world's attention was the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is a "point-and-click" multimedia interface for the Internet. In a very basic sense, it is as intuitive and simple to use as an interface can get. To interact and make things happen, you need no more than a mouse (although a keyboard can be useful). Hard to believe, but the WWW has been in existence since 1991. Now, the next sentence is for real: the WWW was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at Switzerland's CERN (the European laboratory for particle physics) as a way for astronomers to exchange photographs and illustrations, along with text, in a straight-forward fashion. Before the WWW, sharing data involved moving it around in at least three steps, employing several separate applications. One had to search (and hopefully locate) an item, make a remote connection to the computer where that item resided through dial-up or FTP, and then retrieve the item to a local machine. What researchers at CERN wanted was a single, elegant, common interface that would allow ready access to information with no multi-step contortions.

Meteoric Growth.....

The key to the success of the World Wide Web has been the rapid development of graphical Web browsers. Browsers are programs that allow you to "see" the WWW and use its "point-and-click" facilities. Netscape Navigator, by far the dominant browser brand on the market (estimated in mid-1996 to be used by 75-80 percent of those browsing the Web), is the result of commercial development of Mosaic, a browser developed for scientific research use by the National Center for Super-computing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign, Illinois. The growth of the WWW puts to shame even the growth of the Net before it. The number of Web servers on-line grew from 130 in June, 1993, to 38,796 at the end of June, 1995. Today, there are well over 50,000 Web servers on-line. Estimates for the number of Web pages range from 30 million to 50 million.

How It All Works.....

You'd think something like the Internet is extremely well organized, with a CEO, offices in every major city, volumes and volumes of policies, and many thousands of employees. Nope! There is no central authority behind the Internet. There is no central computer. There is no center to speak of at all. The Net is a loose confederation of interconnected networks. It is governed by a protocol called TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) - a set of standards developed in the late '60s and early '70s, which permits information sharing between different computers running incompatible operating systems. In a very basic sense, the rule simply says that data should be broken up into chunks called packets, and that the first part of each packet should consist of the address to which it should go. At the edges of the Internet are computers known as hosts. A host can be either a server or a client - or both. This duality makes the Internet truly powerful, and allows for exponential growth. Servers are operated by companies and organizations just like us here at the 2 Fords Network, all interested in distributing information. Servers are the computers which store this information. When information is requested over the network, the server divides the data into a bunch of packets and sends them blindly to the nearest available Internet connection. These connections to the Internet backbone are called Net Access Points, or NAPs for short. (When you hear techies talking about NAPs, rest assured, they're not going to sleep anytime soon.) Servers are constantly "listening" for requests to arrive from the network. They then attempt to locate requested resources, and provide back over the network either those resources or an error message (if the requested resources are non-existent). Once the packets arrive on the Internet, they are received by another computer called a router. Routers are computers that have some general knowledge of where things are on the Net, although no single router has complete knowledge of the whole Net. The router reads the address from the first part of each packet, then sends the packet in the right general direction, depending on the best path available at that moment. Usually, a packet will travel through several routers before reaching its destination. The router at every intersection performs exactly the same operation. A router's knowledge is limited to the best path to another router at a point in time. Requests for information are generated by clients. Clients are computers operated by users like you. A user makes a request for information from a known source by sending out its Uniform Resource Locator (URL). An URL is a standardized address format (such as, http://www.fordpub.com/). The URL describes the protocol needed to access a page, and points to the page's Internet location and home directory. The most common protocol on the Web is "HTTP," which stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. Hypertext is the method of constructing documents containing cross references or "links," which, with the aid of an interactive browser program, allow the reader to move easily from one document to another. The client, however, does much more than send out requests for information. Client/Server technology optimally divides the processing load between client and server. This allows the client to concentrate on providing the best possible interface for the user via cool graphical displays and powerful visual controls. The server is free to concentrate on servicing requests. This division of labor makes it possible for Web servers to handle tens of thousands of requests every day - an average load for popular Web sites.

The Future.....

The Internet's success is the consequence of unleashing the power of individual creativity. It allows the local shoe store to establish as big a presence as Payless Shoesource. It is the triumph of the free market over central planning. The basic ingredients of this success are openness and interactivity. In techie-speak, it's hardware- and operating- system- independent (you should have a fairly good idea of what we're talking about by now), based on standardized, easy - to- implement protocols. The Internet is far more than a new form of media. It is a culture. (Dedicated Internet addicts refer to themselves as Netizens - InterNet Citizens.) It is a new distribution channel. A new creative medium. A new advertising and marketing channel. A vast new information bank, sometimes referred to as the "virtual library." The Internet is a new way of doing business. Get with it, before you get left behind.

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