Internet Terms and Definition

Internet Terms and Definition

·         Anti-virus Program

·         Software that Monitors a computer for viruses and eliminates them before damage occurs.

·         Applet

·         A small program, written in language called “JAVA” that can be placed in a web page and runs automatically when the page opens on your computer.

·         Applets are normally used for special effects.

·         Archive

·         A repository for software, data, or other materials to be saved and preserved. FTP sites are known as archives.

·         ASCII (American Standard Code for information Interchange)

·         A code used by computers to represent all the letters, numbers, etc on a computer keyboard.

·         Bandwidth

·         How much stuff you can send through a connection to the internet.

·         Baud Rate

·         The rate at which a modem (The Piece of equipment that canconnect your computer to the internet) can send or received information.

·         BBS (Bulletin Board System)

·         The computerized equivalent of a notice board.

·         Binary

·         A number system based on zeros and ones (0 and 1)

·         Bitmap

·         A graphic which is defined by specifying the colors of dots or pixels which make up the picture. Common types of bitmap graphics are GIF, JPEG, Photoshop, PCX, TIFF, BMP, and TGA.

·         Blogs or Blogging

·         A blog is a way for someone to present a running journal  for a wide variety of a readers.

·         Bookmark

·         A way for web browser user to mark a web page they want to return to later.

·         Bounce

·         The return of an e-mail message because of an error in its address.

·         Bug

·         A bud is programming error that causes a program or computer system to perform erratically, produce incorrect results or crash.

·         Byte

·         A measurement of data. Usually there are 8 bits in a byte- sometimes more, depending on how the measurement is being made.

·         CGI

·         A small program that takes information entered on a web page and does something with it, like turning a web form into an e-mail message. Examples of CGI programs are web site guestbooks or online shopping facilities.

·         Chain Letter

·         A form of SPAM which ask you to distribute the letter to many people.

·         Chat

·         A Form of real time electronics communication where participants type want to say, and it is repeated on the screens of all other participants in the same chat.

·         Chat Room

·         A place on the internet where people go to “CHAT” with other people.

·         Client

·         In Internet Terms, it’s an application that performs a specific functions, such as telnet or FTP.

·         Counter

·         A number seen on some web pages which indicates the number of visits the page has had

·         Cyber Space

·         A word used to describe the internet. The term was coined by science-fiction novelist William Gibson in 1984 in neuromancer.

·         Database

·         A collection of data records. On web databases, records may consist of web pages, or graohics or audio files, or newspaper files, or books, or movies, or press releases or almost anything from very general to very specific areas of interest.

·         Dedicated Line

·         This is a communication line that is used solely for computer connections

·         Dial-up

·         This is widely used method of accessing the internet.

·         Domain Name

·         The unique name that identifies an internet site.

·         Download      

·         The transfer of information from a computer on the internet onto your computer.

·         Electronics Mail

·         Messages sent from one person to another via computer.

·         Ethernet

·         A very common method of linking computers together.

·         FAQ(Frequently Asked Questions)

·         Documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject.

·         Firewall

·         Firewalls are special computers or computer Programs that are set up on a network.

·         FTP(File Transfer Protocol)

·         Generally, any text that contains links to other documents.

·         A very common method of moving files between two computers.

·         GIF(Graphic Intechange Format)

·         A type of image file commonly found on the world wide web.

·         Giga Byte

·         A measure of stored information on a computer.

·         Hacker

·         Perform other destructive or illegal acts with computers and networks.

·         Header

·         Headers are not normally visible when reading emails or newsgroup.

·         Hits

·         The number of pieces of information downloaded from a web site.

·         Homepage

·         The main, or front, web page for a business, organization, person.

·         Host

·         May be the computer on which a web site is physically located.

·         HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

·         The script Language used to create web pages.

·         HTTP (Hypertext Transport Protocol)

·         The Language used by computers on the world wide web to communicate one another.

·         Hyperlink

·         Hyperlinks are words, phrases, or graphic images that have URL’s hidden in them.

·         Hypertext

·         Generally, any text that contains links to other documents.

Browser

Browser

A browser is an application program that provides a way to look at and interact with all the information on the World Wide Web. The word "browser" seems to have originated prior to the Web as a generic term for user interfaces that let you browse (navigate through and read)text files online.

Technically, a Web browser is a client program that uses HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to make requests of Web servers throughout the Internet on behalf of the browser user. Most browsers support e-mail and the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) but a Web browser is not required for those Internet protocols and more specialized client programs are more popular.

The first Web browser, called WorldWideWeb, was created in 1990. That browser's name was changed to Nexus to avoid confusion with the developing information space known as the World Wide Web. The first Web browser with a graphical user interface was Mosaic, which appeared in 1993. Many of the user interface features in Mosaic went into Netscape Navigator. Microsoft followed with its Internet Explorer (IE).

Network Backbone

Network Backbone

A backbone network or network backbone is a part of computer network infrastructure that interconnects various pieces of network, providing a path for the exchange of information between different LANs or subnetworks. A backbone can tie together diverse networks in the same building, in different buildings in a campus environment, or over wide areas. Normally, the backbone's capacity is greater than the networks connected to it.

A large corporation that has many locations may have a backbone network that ties all of the locations together, for example, if a server cluster needs to be accessed by different departments of a company that are located at different geographical locations. The pieces of the network connections (for example: ethernet, wireless) that bring these departments together is often mentioned as network backbone. Network congestion is often taken into consideration while designing backbones.

One example of a backbone network is the Internet backbone.

Internetwork

Internetworking

Internetworking is the practice of connecting a computer network with other networks through the use of gateways that provide a common method of routing information packets between the networks. The resulting system of interconnected networks is called an internetwork, or simply an internet. Internetworking is a combination of the words inter ("between") and networking; not internet-working or international-network.

The most notable example of internetworking is the Internet, a network of networks based on many underlying hardware technologies, but unified by an internetworking protocol standard, the Internet Protocol Suite, often also referred to as TCP/IP.

The smallest amount of effort to create an internet (an internetwork, not the Internet), is to have two LANs of computers connected to each other via a router. Simply using either a switch or a hub to connect two local area networks together doesn't imply internetworking, it just expands the original LAN.

The NSFNet

NSFNet

The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation(NSF) beginning in 1985 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States.^[1] NSFNET was also the name given to several nationwide backbone networks that were constructed to support NSF's networking initiatives from 1985 to 1995. Initially created to link researchers to the nation's NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.

The Arpanet

ARPANET

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) is a predecessor to the modern Internet. It was conceptualized in the 1950s, when computer scientists needed something better than the then available but unreliable switching nodes and network links.

There were also only a limited number of large, powerful research computers, and researchers with access were separated geographically. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) commissioned the development of an advanced and reliable way to connect these computers through a newly devised packet switching network, which was known as ARPANET.

INTERNET

History of Internet

The history of the Internet begins with the development of electronic computers in the 1950s. Initial concepts of packet networking originated in several computer science laboratories in the United States, Great Britain, and France. The US Department of Defense awarded contracts as early as the 1960s for packet network systems, including the development of the ARPANET (which would become the first network to use the Internet Protocol.) The first message was sent over the ARPANET from computer science Professor Leonard Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to the second network node at Stanford Research Institute(SRI).

Packet switching networks such as ARPANET, NPL network, CYCLADES,Merit Network, Tymnet, and Telenet, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of communications protocols. Donald Davies was the first to put theory into practice by designing a packet-switched network at the National Physics Laboratory in the UK, the first of its kind in the world and the cornerstone for UK research for almost two decades. Following, ARPANET further led to the development of protocols for internetworking, in which multiple separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) was introduced as the standard networking protocol on the ARPANET. In the early 1980s the NSF funded the establishment for national supercomputing centers at several universities, and provided interconnectivity in 1986 with the NSFNET project, which also created network access to the supercomputer sites in the United States from research and education organizations. Commercial Internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the very late 1980s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990. Limited private connections to parts of the Internet by officially commercial entities emerged in several American cities by late 1989 and 1990, and the NSFNET was decommissioned in 1995, removing the last restrictions on the use of the Internet to carry commercial traffic.

In the 1980s, the work of Tim Berners-Lee in the United Kingdom, on theWorld Wide Web, theorised the fact that protocols link hypertext documents into a working system, marking the beginning of the modern Internet. Since the mid-1990s, the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on culture and commerce, including the rise of near-instant communication by electronic mail,instant messaging, voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone calls, two-way interactive video calls, and the World Wide Web with its discussion forums, blogs, social networking, and online shopping sites. The research and education community continues to develop and use advanced networks such as NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS), Internet2, and National LambdaRail. Increasing amounts of data are transmitted at higher and higher speeds over fiber optic networks operating at 1-Gbit/s, 10-Gbit/s, or more. The Internet's takeover of the global communication landscape was almost instant in historical terms: it only communicated 1% of the information flowing through two-way telecommunications networks in the year 1993, already 51% by 2000, and more than 97% of the telecommunicated information by 2007. Today the Internet continues to grow, driven by ever greater amounts of online information, commerce, entertainment, and social networking.