Before this time it was mostly govern- ments, universities, and a few large businesses that made use of the Internet. What concerns private interests is that the number of connections remained chiefly intended for the real hobbyists. And because there were so few private interests, businesses had little interest in building up their private relationships in this manner. But in the past two years, much has changed. New developments in the area of PC's has played a role in these changes, as has fierce competition between the providers.
Providers are firms that look after the connections between a PC at home and the actual Internet.
Whoever wants access to the Internet buys a PC and a modem and subscribes to a provider. One receives from the provider the proper software and a phone number which one can call with the modem in order to log on the the actual Internet. It will go too far to explain what all the Internet offers. We shall turn our attention to two parts of particular importance to genealogy. And those are the World Wide Web and E-mail.