Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online
Second, the Internet community is vast, wide, and dispersed. It's not uncommon for many individuals or communities (sometimes unknown to each other) to be working on similar problems and to come up with their own solutions to those problems.
For example, Gopher, Hytelnet, TechInfo, and WWW all, to some extent, represent solutions to several problems. Similarly, in the "how do I find someone's e-mail address" arena, there's Michael Schwartz' NetFind, Daniel Kegel's uwho, whois++, and so on. Many problems can have more than one solution.
Each tool was created to meet its own organization's needs, so each works differently and usually offers slightly different features. We don't all work the same way--you'll like some tools more than others, or pick one based on price, availability, or the computer environment with which it works.
Note: So, often a number of tools exist that let you do
basically the same thing. As if that weren't enough, often many ways exist to
access any given tool. Consider three of the ASCII-oriented clients for
WWW--there's a line browser (generally named www),
screen-oriented browser (called web), and (most popularly) one called
Lynx (lynx) which seems to do ASCII access to the Web best.
Differences include the commands to move the cursor, get help, and so on (the
"look and feel" of the programs), what types of computers they're available
for, and how well they perform. Users with the proper type of connections
probably prefer to use Mosaic, yet another Web browser, which handles text
documents as well as still images, sounds, and
movies.