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What is it?
Less than five years ago, it was
still a faraway dream for an Indian to be able communicate with a family
member or friend posted miles away in the far regions of America, Australia
or Europe, without feeling the stress on the purse or the stress of
waiting.
The advent of Internet has changed all that and words like cyber highway,
e-mail, surfing and so on have become commonplace. To get to the roots,
let’s take a look at some of the commonly used Internet jargon.
Imagine a massive road linking all the places on the earth, such as the
national highway network. If such imaginary roads existed in space, it would
be a cyber highway or cyberway,
as it is called. For each of
these places to be connected, one needs basic infrastructure such as a
central receiving station, disbursal and receiving within a country and
local city centres.
What is Internet?
Like the telephone subscriber, one
needs to have the basic instrument to facilitate receiving and disbursing of
information, messages etc. Here, the Internet subscriber needs a computer, a
modem and a connection to be a part of the cyber world.
The Internet is a network that connects various computers spread across
diverse locations using standardised communication interfaces. When a
subscriber has Internet connectivity an individual identity (username
or login) is allotted to him.
Every time a person logs in and gives his identity, his ‘call’ goes to
the local office and from thereon to a common Gateway
Internet Access Service (gias), which disburses the message or the
information, much like it happens when we make a telephone call. The
exchange code connects the person to the local telephone area and then to
the exchange area of the called number. This exchange in turn puts him on to
the particular number.
Let’s take the case of international calls – 00 tells my local exchange
it is an international call; 91 takes me to the India connection; 44
connects me to Chennai and at the Chennai receiving centre, the area code
takes me to the concerned local exchange and thereon to the concerned
person/number. This more or less is what happens when we log in and get into
the Internet and type the address of the web site we are interested
in.
The ABC of the three WWWs
The Internet has many applications
and one of the most commonly used ones is the World Wide Web. Because of its easy-to-use interface with a complex
network of computers and data, the World Wide Web or the WWW has become one
of the most widely used applications.
There are some basics here that one needs to know and these include
browsers, sites and addresses. To get to the world beyond, you need a
window, right? A browser provides
you precisely that. It acts as the central window from which to begin and
end the exercise of gathering information. It has information on all the
registered web sites in the world. Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator
are the most popular browsers in the world market today.
A Web site is a collection of related Web pages with a common Web
address. The information that appears on the Web pages is written in a
language called HyperText Mark-up Language or HTML. The Web pages also have links,
which in simple English means a surfer can move over to other related
information by clicking on the link. (Links are usually underlined and in a
different colour).
Each
of the Web sites has a unique address that is accessible from anywhere in
the world and this address is referred to as Web
address or as Uniform Resource
Locator (URL) in Internet jargon.
The last three letters
indicate whether the site belongs to a company (com), a non-profit
organisation (org), government institution (gov), a portal for an
educational institute (edu), a network (net), or military (mil). These
extensions are called domains and the above mentioned are the six main
domains.
Very often, just keying in the
Web address would take the surfer to the Home Page for the site. However,
there may be instances when you may have to specify a path of file name as
well.
Surfing
on the cyberway
Surfing the Web is an easy task. All one needs to do is to key in the Web
address and hit the Enter (or Return) key on the keyboard. A good place to start would be Netscape's "What's Cool" page
which can be found by pressing the "What's Cool" button located
under the address location box on Netscape browsers.
You could click on any of the links on the page, to
move from page to page. Remember that links are underlined and are in a
different colour. Also do remember that any time you want to go back, all
you have to do is click on the ‘Back’ arrow button to return to any
page. Since the browser automatically saves all the Web pages in your hard
drive (the disk cache), you can immediately go back without waiting for the
pages to reload.
Searching on the Web
When you are specifically looking for
something, you will have to search for it from the wide range of information
that is available on the Internet. Directories, Search Engines, and Meta
Search Engines are three services available to help you with the exercise.
Directories are sites that provide a list of all the major sites and
companies on the Web. Yahoo is one example. Alta Vista and Infoseek are
Search Engines that read the entire text of all sites on the Web and create
an index based on the occurrence of key words for each site. If we wish to
search several search engines at once, we do need something to submit the
query to the directory and the search engines. The Meta Search Engines (an
example of which is Metacrawler) performs this task.
Web multimedia
From being primarily text based, the
Web has moved rapidly to include audio facilities such as listening to
broadcasts, sample songs and even have a Web phone conversation (two-way),
video facilities and even manipulate three dimensional presentations.
Other applications
Electronic mail or e-mail and Usenet are some of the
more popularly used applications of the Internet. Most of the browsers
include integrated e-mail software. UseNet is a very large public bulletin
board where individuals can exchange ideas and information, or even conduct
business.
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