Here’s the third (and final) of the recovered lost episodes of A User’s Guide to the Future, originally broadcast on CBC Radio in Prince Edward Island in the summer of 1994 (exact broadcast date lost to time).

In this episode, titled A User’s Guide to the Present, we left the future and concentrated on the present: how could “regular everyday people” get hooked up to the “information highway.”

The first thing you need is a modem. This is something you can buy for your computer that allows you to communicate with other computers — like the ones that form the Internet — over normal telephone lines.

When this episode was first broadcast, our local ISP Island Services Network was still several months away from being born: we got our Internet from the now-defunct partnership of Online Support and Island Tel called PEINet.

This was also pre-Google (still several years away), the first summer of Yahoo!, and we searched the “web” by searching “Gopherspace” using Veronica.