The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog
More info
- Creator
- Ed Krol
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- Book
- Publisher
- O'Reilly & Associates
Ed Krol's 1992 book that taught a generation to use telnet, FTP, Gopher and Usenet — written just before the web made most of it obsolete.
Krol was a network administrator at the University of Illinois and had already written The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Internet (RFC 1118). The O'Reilly book was its grown-up version: how to log in with telnet, fetch files over anonymous FTP, search with Archie and read Usenet, followed by a catalogue of resources sorted by subject.
It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and for many newcomers simply was the map of the net. The catalogue section led O'Reilly to launch the Global Network Navigator in 1993, one of the first commercial websites. The next edition had to make room for the World Wide Web — a chapter that soon ate the rest of the book.