Hackers are programming wizards. They can navigate through a network or computer system in the dark, with their eyes closed and their hands tied behind their backs. They often stay up late and eat poorly. When they attend a rare social gathering, they seem to speak a strange language full of words like "man pages," "grep," "pipes," "tastee cakes," and "shells." The media tries to fool us into thinking that hackers are criminals. Not so. Although some indulge in illegal activities, other hackers just try to write code and help other people navigate through the Net.

Short for HyperText Markup Language, this is the language or marking system people use to create hypertext documents like web pages .

When browsing through a hypertext document, you may find that certain words appear in a different color or are underlined. By clicking on these words, you'll be taken in a new direction -- to a different part of the document that explains or expands on the term, or to a destination elsewhere on the Net. Images can be hyperlinked, too.

This is an information space which can be explored in a nonlinear way. Users navigate through the space by clicking on hyperlinks . Web pages are hypertext documents, and they are created with HTML.

This is the global network of networks. It really isn't a single entity at all, but each of its many parts uses the same TCP/IP protocol to make sure that information flows easily between the parts.