Information providers set up hypermedia servers which browsers can get documents from. On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of documents and databases. The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents. Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way - select the pointer, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.
Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext - it is any medium with pointers to other media.
This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations. Integrity Online provides an FTP while you are connected to the Internet, allowing you to access very large amounts of files available on a great number of computer systems. A good source of information on archives in general is the Usenet newsgroup comp.archives. Email is comprised of a software package that allows you to send and receive electronic mail to anyone else on the Internet including people on CompuServe, America Online etc. Most Email packages are fairly intuitive.