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GLOSSARY |
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Abbreviations - for a full list of all the abbreviations commonly used relating to the Internet go to: http://www.jonesac.freeuk.com/documents/jargon.htm
ARPANET This is an acronym for Advanced Research Projects Administration Network, the computer network system that gave birth to the Internet. ARPANET began in 1969 as a U.S. Department of Defense experiment in packet-switched networking.
Browser A browser is a software program that allows you to view and interact with various kinds of Internet resources available on the World Wide Web. A browser is commonly called a web browser.
Chat describes the way people communicate online in real time. The term "chat" is actually a misnomer. Typically, people in online chat sessions type messages to each other using their keyboards. The message then appears on the screens of all the participants. Chats can involve two or more people.
File Compression File compression is a way of reducing the size of one or more files, so that they don't take up a lot of space on a server or hard drive and can travel faster over a network. File compression is accomplished with software that uses mathematical equations (algorithms) to condense repeated data into smaller codes. You need another separate software program to decompress (expand) the data, and restore it to its original form.
FTP This is an acronym for File Transfer Protocol - a very common method of transferring one or more files from one computer to another. FTP is a specific way to connect to another Internet site to retrieve and send files. FTP was developed in the early days of the Internet to copy files from computer to computer. With the advent of the World Wide Web, and web browser software, you no longer need to know arcane FTP commands to copy to and from other computers. In your browser, you can use FTP by typing the URL into the location box at the top of your screen. For example, typing ftp://name.of.site/directory/filename.zip transfers the file filename.zip to your computer's hard disk. Typing ftp://name.of.site/directory/ gives you a listing of all the files available in that directory. If your web browser doesn't have built-in FTP capability, or if you want to upload files to a remote computer, you will need to use an FTP client program to transfer files. To use FTP, you need to know the name of the file, the computer where it resides, and the directory it's in. Most files are available via "anonymous FTP," which means you can log into the machine with the user name "anonymous" and use your e-mail address as your password. Return to Internet Facilities
Gopher is an application that was developed at the University of Minnesota to help organize files on the Internet. Named after the school's football mascot, Gopher is a subject-based, menu-driven guide to finding and retrieving directories of information on the Internet.
HTML An acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, HTML is the computer language used to create hypertext documents. HTML uses a finite list of tags that describe the general structure of various kinds of documents linked together on the World Wide Web.
Intranet An intranet is basically an internal Internet designed to be used within the confines of a company, university, or organization. What distinguishes an intranet from the freely accessible Internet is that an intranet is private. Until recently most corporations relied on proprietary hardware and software systems to network its computers, a costly and time-consuming process made more difficult when offices are scattered around the world. Even under the best of conditions, sharing information among different hardware platforms, file formats and software is not an easy task. By using off-the-shelf Internet technology, intranets solve this problem, making internal communication and collaboration much simpler.
ISDN An acronym for Integrated Services Digital Network, ISDN lines are connections that use ordinary phone lines to transmit digital instead of analog signals, allowing data to be transmitted at a much faster rate than with a traditional modem.
Internet Service Provider Also called an ISP or access providers, Internet service providers refers to the remote computer system to which you connect your personal computer and through which you connect to the Internet. Internet service providers that you access by modem and telephone line are often called dial-up services.
Mailing List A mailing list is a way of having a group discussion by electronic mail and distributing announcements to a large number of people. A mailing list is very much like a conference on a BBS, except that the conversation comes to you in your e-mail box. Each time you or any member of the list posts a reply to the conversation, it is distributed to the e-mail box of every member of the list. All of this traffic is automated and managed by programs called mailing list managers (MLMs). The two most frequently used programs are Listserv and Majordomo.
Modem Short for Modulator/Demodulator, a modem is a device that allows remote computers to communicate, to transmit and receive data using telephone lines.
Netiquette is a form of online etiquette -- an informal code of conduct that governs what is generally considered to be the acceptable way for users to interact with one another online.
Netscape Founded in 1994 by Jim Clark and Mark Andreessen, Netscape developed the first commercially successful web browser, Netscape Navigator. The browser, based on the Mosaic software from the National Center for Supercomputing, helped fuel the explosive growth of the World Wide Web. Netscape is now owned by America Online.
Newsgroup A newsgroup is an electronic discussion group consisting of collections of related postings (also called articles) on a particular topic that are posted to a news server which then distributes them to other participating servers. There are thousands of newsgroups covering a wide range of subjects. You must subscribe to a newsgroup in order to participate in it or to track the discussion on an on-going basis. Unlike a magazine or newspaper subscription, a subscription to a newsgroup is free.
PDF An acronym for Portable Document Format, PDF is a file type created by Adobe Systems, Inc. that allows fully formatted, high-resolution, PostScript documents to be easily transmitted across the Internet and viewed on any computer that has Adobe Acrobat Reader software (a proprietary viewer is available for free at the Adobe site). Corporations that have invested in brand name identification use PDF to display the original look of their logos and advertising. Publishers can create a high-quality brochure and then "publish" it as is, without converting it to HTML. Anyone interested in presenting documents with the highest possible resolution or a complex layout might choose to use PDF. PDF files can be distributed via e-mail, web pages, CD-ROMs, online services and LANs. They can also contain hyperlinks, QuickTime� movies, and sound clips.
Protocol A protocol is the standard or set of rules that two computers use to communicate with each other. Also known as a communications protocol or network protocol, this is a set of standards that assures that different network products or programs can work together. Any product that uses a given protocol should work with any other product using the same protocol.
Telnet is a software program that allows you to log in to other remote computers on the Internet to which you have access. Once you are logged into the remote system, you can download files, engage in conferencing, and perform the same commands as if you were directly connected by computer. You need an Internet account to be able to use a telnet program.
URL An acronym for Uniform Resource Locator, a URL is the address for a resource or site (usually a directory or file) on the World Wide Web and the convention that web browsers use for locating files and other remote services.
Usenet refers to the collection of newsgroups (sometimes called the Big Eight hierarchies) and a set of agreed-upon rules for distributing and maintaining them. More than 13,000 newsgroups exist around the world and the majority of them are a part of Usenet. However, a fairly large number of alternative newsgroups have emerged outside of Usenet.
Veronica An acronym for Very Easy Rodent Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives, Veronica is a network utility that lets you search all of the world's Gopher server (which is where the "rodent" part figures in) by keywords. This amounts to over 10 million items from over 6,000 Gopher servers. You can then display a list of Gopher menus and articles containing the search text. Use Veronica if you don't know which Gopher server has the information you need. See Gopher.
World Wide Web The exact definition of the World Wide Web (popularly known as the Web) varies, depending on whom you ask. Three common descriptions are: 1.A collection of resources (Gopher, FTP, http, telnet, Usenet, WAIS, and others) that can be accessed via a web browser. 2. A collection of hypertext files available on web servers.3. A set of specifications (protocols) that allows the transmission of web pages over the Internet.You can think of the Web as a worldwide collection of text and multimedia files and other network services interconnected via a system of hypertext documents. Http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) was created in 1990, at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, as a means for sharing scientific data internationally, instantly, and inexpensively. With hypertext, a word or phrase can contain a link to other text. To achieve this, CERN developed a programming language called HTML, that allows you to easily link to other pages or network services on the Web.
WinZip A WinZip is a compression program for Windows that allows you to "zip" and "unzip" Zip files, as well as other standard types of archive files.
Zip is a popular standard for file compression on the PC. You can recognize it by the .zip file extension.
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This is the end of the "Story of the Internet"
