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What is the Internet?

The Internet today is a large-scale network of millions of computers that allows continuous communication across the globe. The various aspects of the Internet are:

• The World-Wide Web (the web or WWW)
• Electronic Mail (E-Mail)
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Internet Relay chat (IRC)
• USENET (a news service)

The World-Wide Web

he www is the reason the Internet has become as popular as it has. This is the part of the Internet that the majority of users see — the websites and the pages that make them up. The web is the most widely used service of the Internet, accessed through a web browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. These pieces of software are gradually integrating other parts of the Internet into them (most notably e-mail and ftp), so that eventually we will have one interface to the entire array of services the Internet offers.

The web is an immense collection of web pages, linked together with hypertext links. Thousands of new pages of information are added to the heaving web every hour. Each page is placed on a server, a computer continually connected to the rest of the web. The information is then available to anyone else with access to the Internet. Web pages can have a mixture of text, graphics and multimedia. Nowadays, there's information on practically anything you could be interested in available somewhere on the web. You can use a search engine to find what you want.

E-Mail

Electronic Mail works in much the same way as traditional mail (now charmingly labeled 'snail-mail') does. Anyone is allowed to sign up for an e-mail address and then people can send you messages, or attach files from their computer and send them too. The main benefit of e-mail is the close to instantaneous delivery of messages that occurs. You can send an e-mail to the other side of the world and it will arrive in less than a minute. You can also sign up to weekly newsletters and have information you want delivered right to your computer.

File transfer protocol

While web pages are transferred between computers using the http protocol, other types of files are sent using FTP. People can share files, like music and videos, among each other and the rest of the world by uploading them to a server and allowing others to download them to their own computers.

Internet Relay Chat

IRC is a service that allows you to connect to your chosen channel and talk in real-time to people with the same interests as you. You can download » mIRC and start chatting right away.

USENET

USENET (Unix User Network) is a system of bulletin boards where you and anyone else can post messages and people will read and reply to them. As with IRC, you will find boards set up for all sorts of groups of people. The search engine » Google has set up a web-interface for these discussion boards.

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