From the Mouse Pad

by Brad Jensen

Are you having fun on the Internet yet? Since it has been the topic since the inception of this column, why break tradition? This issue is dedicated to clearing some confusion regarding the Internet and providing a handy, albeit miniature, dictionary of terms on the Internet.

A common mistake I hear from newcomers is the confusion between the World Wide Web and the Internet: the Internet and the Web are not synonymous. The Web provides a method for sharing content and communicating while the Internet provides the powerful and universal connectivity underlying the Web. You can roughly think of the Internet as an operating system and the Web as an application. The Web allows access to a very large universe of documents. The Web is actually a superset of many of the more common Internet protocols.

Did you ever wonder where email addresses came from? (No, not a stork.) Well, maybe it isn't the most pressing issue but it may help you understand more about what is going on "behind the scenes." A typical Internet email address is fred@aol.com. From this you know that on the Internet system "aol.com" (America On-Line), there is a user named "Fred." While this is relatively easy for you and I to understand, computers deal much better with numbers. Thus, the address is broken down into a unique number and the Internet essentially uses a universal database to translate the user friendly "aol.com" into a unique number that can be used to move information around the Internet. The last part of the email tells a little bit about the Internet system. Some of the most common are com (commercial organizations), edu (educational institutions), gov (governmental agencies), mil (military departments), net (network providers), and org (other organizations).

By the way, if you weren't already aware of how the Internet moves information, it slices your email message into "packets" which are separated and moved along the Internet in the most expedient fashion. It is entirely possible that each "packet" travels a different route to arrive at the destination and that the order of the "packets" is jumbled upon arrival. Lucky for us, a packet contains enough information to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Finally, the promised miniature dictionary. Hopefully, next time you hear the term "Gopher", you won't go set the traps in your yard!

Protocol	Description
Archie	A system that helps you find files located anywhere on the Internet. After Archie locates the file, you can use FTP to get it. Archie is both a program and a system of server computers that contain indexes of files.
Bandwidth	How much "stuff" you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits per second (bps). A full page of English text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second.
Finger	Returns information on users on a specific Internet machine
Firewall	A filter for messages. If an organization wants to exchange mail with the Internet, but does not want other Internet members to be able to read access its files, its connection to the Internet can be protected by using a firewall
FTP	File Transfer Protocol. Copies files from one Internet machine to another.
Gopher	A system that lets you find information by using menus.
HTML	A system used for writing pages for the World Wide Web. HTML allows text to include codes that define fonts, layout, embedded graphics, and hypertext links.
IRC	Internet Relay Chat. Real-time text-based conversation system.
POP	Post Office Protocol. A system by which a mail server on the Internet lets you grab your mail and download it to your PC or Macintosh.
SMTP	Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. A protocol used to transfer e-mail messages between computers.
TCP/IP	The system that networks use to communicate with each other on the Internet.
Telnet	The command and program used to login from one Internet site to another. The Telnet command/program gets you to the "login" prompt of another host.
URL	The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet that is part of the World Wide Web. An example of a URL: "http://www.bwaldron.com/ipmaac/."
USENET	An informal group of systems that exchanges news.
VERONICA	A program that uses word searches to locate articles in Gopherspace. Veronica is a constantly updated database of names of almost every menu item on thousands of Gopher servers.
WWW	World Wide Web. Protocol for distributed hypertext document searching, navigation, and retrieval. Also referred to as the Web.

That's it for this issue. Remember, if there is something you would like to see in this column, send me, Bill Waldron or Jim Johnson an email.