12th grade
12th grade
A computer, a modem for changing digital computer signals to analogue ones that can travel down telephone lines, browser and communications software, and an account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Most modern machines have built-in modems that can be connected to the telephone lines. The Internet Service Provider's web server creates the link between the home computer and the Internet when a certain telephone number is dialled and the connection made. The communications software stores and dials this number.
The Internet is a global computer network, made up of thousands of smaller networks, all interconnected by telecommunications cables and systems.
Email or Electronic Mail is the sending of letters or messages over the Internet to another computer user. It has the advantage of fast delivery in comparison to the traditional post or snail mail and is also cheaper. Each person has to have an email address and some kind of email software like Microsoft Outlook or Eudora. Files of any type, e.g. graphics, programs, midi, may be attached to the email.
Email software often has the facility to create address books and to send to multiple recipients at the same time. Email can also be a nuisance in the form of Spam. Spam is unsolicited email sent to many people in one go.
The Internet began in the 1960s as ARPANet, a computer network in the United States that was intended to protect its computer systems in the event of a nuclear war. Many of the computers on the network were situated in universities and academic staff and students began using the network for their own purposes.
Email was already being used, but information was all in the form of text and needed a special knowledge of computers to gain access to it. An Englishman working at the CERN research laboratories in Geneva developed a simple WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) browser called Mosaic that allowed pictures to be viewed with the text and this evolved into the browsers that we have today.
An Intranet is a website that is available to the members of one organisation only and is separate from the Internet that anyone can access. An Intranet in school would perhaps have separate sections for each department with homework for various classes displayed or the syllabus for a particular subject, and lots of other useful information for students.
Programs called search engines (Alta Vista, Lycos, and HotBot) and directories (e.g. Yahoo) will accept keywords that we type in and find documents that contain them. The titles of these documents are shown as a list. The document is opened when we click on the title.
Because the documents are multimedia and may contain animated graphics, video clips, or sound files of various types, sometimes additional pieces of software need to be downloaded (usually free) to be able to view the pages properly.
The internet has several purposes, but the main one is communication. Communication takes place in different ways:
� The display of multimedia documents on the World Wide Web
� Email
� Newsgroups
� Bulletin Boards
� Chat
� ICQ
Many different software packages enable all this communication in all its different forms, but one thing they must have in common is the use of protocols (or rules about how to transfer information). You may have seen the initials TCP/IP which stand for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol .
A Bulletin Board (BBS) is the sending and reading of messages on a central computer, rather like placing adverts on a notice board. Bulletin boards tend to be dedicated to one subject only, for example dentistry or online 'Lonely hearts'. The Bulletin board service may entail a fee
Chat or Internet Relay Chat is a real time and interactive method of 'talking' across the Internet using a message box. You can see what someone else is writing and they can see your replies. Chat rooms have become very popular and often involve several people communicating within the same message box. Each person is identified by his or her user name. Chat can become difficult to follow if too many different users are present. Although Chat can be a good medium for making friends, it�s often used for baser purposes.
Internet telephony has been introduced recently so that people can speak over the Internet using microphones.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is all the multimedia documents that comprise the sites on the Web. The pages in the sites are interconnected using hyperlinks. A click of the mouse on a hyperlink takes us to another page. Hyperlinks can be recognised because they are either underlined text or images, and when the cursor is placed above them it changes from the pointer to a hand. Web pages can contain text, sound, images, and video clips. They are truly multimedia pages. Each page has a unique address or URL that contains the letters www for World Wide Web.
Web pages on the World Wide Web are viewed using special software called a browser. Commonly found browsers are Netscape, Explorer, and Opera, although there are many others. Moving from one document to another by clicking on the hyperlinks is called surfing.
Ordinary people can now create their own websites quite easily using software packages like FrontPage, HotDog or DreamWeaver. These packages are called web editors and virtually eliminate the need for knowing HTML code that simple pages consist of because they create the code for the user. A website must be uploaded or published to a web server before it is placed on the Web for other users to access. Another software package called FTP (File Transfer Protocol) does this job. Packages like FrontPage have an FTP facility built in.
A Newsgroup is a discussion about a specific topic consisting of messages written to a central computer called a news server. There are newsgroups on thousands of different subjects. People read the messages, then add their own views by sending a message. Other people can follow the discussion by reading each note in turn (following the threads). The messages are sent to other subscribers of that particular newsgroup through UseNet, a worldwide network of news discussion groups using the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP).
ICQ ('I Seek You') is real-time personal communicator software you can download for free. It allows you to add friends and contacts with ICQ user identification numbers to your address book. When you go online it immediately informs you which of your friends is also online so that you can send them a message in the form of a note, although you can send notes at any time for later reading. ICQ offers many other facilities like email, the ability of sending files to another user, search directories, chat rooms, sending reminders to all your friends about your birthday. There are several forms of personal communicators available, the most popular is probably Mirabilis ICQ, followed by Yahoo Messenger and AOL's AIM.