166 Understanding the Numbers
on your local network as well as to any other network within your WAN,
including the Internet. E-mail has become so popular that U.S. Mail and
overnight delivery services such as FedEx are being rendered obsolete for
some types of communication.
Most e-mail software packages include a basic word-processing applica-
tion with which you can generate your letters. In addition, these packages allow
you to keep mailing lists and send a document to numerous people simultane-
ously. Once sent, a document can be received within seconds by people thou-
sands of miles away. One of the more advantageous features of e-mail is that it
allows you to attach another document—a spreadsheet, graphic presentation,
another word processing report, a picture, or even a database—to your letter,
much as you would do with a paper clip.
Imagine that you have used a spreadsheet package to prepare a budget for
your division in Boston. You print out your letter and spreadsheet and mail or
ship it overnight to the main office in Chicago. You may even include an elec-
tronic copy of your spreadsheet on a f loppy disk, in case the individual in
Chicago needs to further modify the numbers. Sometime within the next day
or two, the recipient will receive the package. He or she will then read the
information and may even use the f loppy disk for additional reporting. Alterna-
tively, using e-mail, you could draft your letter, electronically attach the
spreadsheet file, and send it via e-mail to your recipient in Chicago. Within a
matter of seconds or minutes, she or he will receive the electronic package,
read your letter, and be able to extract your attachment and load it directly into
a spreadsheet software package for any necessary additional processing.
Since colleges and universities have sites on the Internet, many college
students use e-mail regularly to keep in contact with their friends both in the
United States and around the world. Likewise, parents of college students have
picked up the e-mail bug and use it to correspond with their children.
The Internet
The Internet is the worldwide WAN that has become the major growth area in
technology and the business community. While the Internet has been around
for decades, its popularity exploded with the development of the World Wide
Web and the necessary software programs that made the “ Web” very user-
friendly to explore.
Accessing the Internet requires that the user establish a connection to it
called a node. Large organizations have a dedicated data link to the Internet
using very fast data telephone lines. Individual users connect to the Internet
using third-party companies called Internet Service Providers (ISPs), such as
America Online (AOL) and Microsoft Network (MSN). These ISPs allow users
to dial into their computers, which are connected directly to the Internet. Re-
cently, a number of ISPs have started providing high-speed or broadband
connectivity between users and the Internet with the use of cable modems or
DSL technology (as discussed previously). High-speed connectivity will