Interweb Introduction

On this page we will be taking about everything to do with internet from how to set it up to how to use it including all the bits in between.  It can be really hard to get you head round it when it’s your first time using it so there will be plenty of definitions to help you understand it a bit more. As new ones come up they will be in italics.

I think the best place to start is to answer the biggest question of all what is the internet? The internet is a worldwide collection of millions of computers all linked together. Although most people think the internet and the World Wide Web (or simply the web or the net) are the same thing, in fact the web is only part of the internet. The internet is made up of a number of different parts, all
of which communicate using different languages called protocols. Web pages, for example, use the HTTP protocol to transfer web pages from the server they’re stored on to your browser, while e-mail uses SMTP to transfer mail messages from one user to another.

The World Wide Web is made up of millions of web pages (specially formatted documents written in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). You can often jump from one page to another related page using hyperlinks (or simply links) that have been included for this purpose. For example, on the BBC News site, the front page contains many headlines as hyperlinks that you can click to jump to the full story and other links for returning to the front page or viewing other stories.

E-mail messages are transferred from one computer user to another using the SMTP protocol. These might be messages that are typed, or they might include files stored on the sender’s computer (these are called attachments).

Chat is the term given to real-time (occurring immediately) communication between two or more computer users. When one user enters their message on their computer, it appears on the other user’s computer. In this way, users can communicate as if they were chatting in the same room or on the phone.

Also known as forums, bulletin boards or just groups, newsgroups are online discussion groups. Unlike chat, though, newsgroups are not real-time. One user posts a message to the newsgroup and others reply to it in their own time. There are many thousands of newsgroups on the internet, covering every area of interest you can think of.

Lynn Currens

Owner/Handy Helper

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