This is rapidly coming to mean, most people in australia, europe and north america, as well as a few other people scattered around the world. To say these people are able to get onto the net doesn't mean it's easy for them to do so, just that the possibility's there. So even though this cheap form of international communication isn't likely to remain within our grasp for very long, it's certainly worth making use of it now, so we can build some international links that would otherwise be extremely difficult. Once these links are built, they can be maintained even if we lose access to this channel. What we can do on internet today, we'll still be able to do with batch-type networks tomorrow, it will just be harder to initially make the connections.
Internet is a realtime, international computer network.
In fact, it's really a network of networks. This means, there's a lot of smaller, basically autonomous nets which are all linked together in some way to make up the whole thing. The Internet itself was, or is, a particular network within this large jumble, however, it's name has now come to mean the whole thing. Generally speaking, anyone with access to internet will have an internet address. So anyone who has access to internet should be able to send mail to anyone else who has an internet address.