Carol Baroudi first began playing with computers in 1971 at Colgate University, where two things were new: the PDP-10 and women. She was lucky to have unlimited access to the state-of-the-art PDP-10, on which she learned to program and operate the machine. She taught Algol and helped to design the curricula for computer science and women's studies. She majored in Spanish and studied French, which, thanks to the Internet, she can now use every day. In 1975, Carol took a job doing compiler support and development, a perfect use for her background in languages. For six years, she developed software and managed software development. For a while, she had a small business doing high-tech recruiting (she was a headhunter). Though she wrote her first software manuals in 1975, she has been writing for a living since 1984. Carol has described all kinds of software, from the memory-management system of the Wang VS operating system to e-mail products for the PC and Mac. For the past several years, she has been writing books, including Internet Secrets® and E-Mail For Dummies® (both published by IDG Books Worldwide, Inc.), for ordinary people who want to use computers. She enjoys speaking to academic, business, and general audiences about the impact of technology on society and other related topics. (Check out her home page, at http://iecc.com/carol, to see what she's up to.)