When the former, feckless vice president invented the Internet with his "Information Superhighway" speech nearly 10 years ago...

OK, he didn't invent it or create it, and the Internet is more like 20 years old, if you take a couple of engineers' assertion that this still-fledgling medium's birth occurred on Jan. 1, 1983 with the migration to the TCP/IP protocol.

But the Internet now is most certainly a developed medium; at least, it's grown quite a bit since the days of gray-background Web pages, spamless e-mail, super-fast 9600 baud rates, dot-com mania, and a general sense of wonder over this "Internet thing." Once the domain of geeks, now everybody seemingly has a computer or immediate access to one, and a minimum 56K connection.

The world may not have completely figured out the Internet yet, but where we are at the end of 2002 is a far cry from the days when people either feared it to the point of total distain, or thought being involved in it meant instant riches.

The Fall 2002 Internet Journalism class at City College of San Francisco (Journalism 35) took a look at this not-so-brand-new world and tried to attach some perspective to it. The students who survived instructor Jon Rochmis' 19-week, 3-credit course were divided into four teams of coverage that not so coincidentally paralleled the main news sections of Wired News, where Rochmis does his day job: Business, Politics, Infrastructure (Technology and Culture.

Within these pages, you'll learn, among other things, about the worldwide phenomenon of online gaming (Brad Wall), the intricate politics of online gambling (Ianthia Hall-Smith), the much-ballyhooed rivalry between wireless protocols that never actually developed (Alison Esquivel), how the mother of all search engines spawned a whole set of subcultures (Chris Ulbrich) and -- the question on everybody's mind -- why are ccTLDs all the rage (George Kelly)?

The other nagging question, of course, is: Whatever happened to Mahir (Rebecca Wetherby)?