Internet Terminology
This page will help you understand a numbers of new terms that you will confront on the Internet.
Software that allows for the creation and distribution of documents. Increasingly used for transmitting complex documents over the Web, due to its agility in rendering a complex page the same way on a Macintosh, Windows, or UNIX computer. See Amber, PDF
A Web browser plug-in that allows Adobe Acrobat documents to be read within a World Wide Web browser window.
An Internet service that allows a user to search for software on anonymous FTP sites. Archie clients exist for all major operating systems.
A small software application. Applet has gained currency as the term for Java- and JavaScript-based applications. Applets may display animation, or perform sophisticated database queries, or anything else that a small application does.
Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. The Internet evolved from the ARPAnet, which was developed in the 1960's and 1970's by the U.S. Department of Defense. The ARPAnet was designed to survive a nuclear war: instead of depending on vulnerable central servers, it distributed data packets over a complex mesh of nodes. The TCP/IP networking protocols were developed for the ARPAnet.
American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The traditional system for encoding characters used in English, including numbers, punctuation, and other symbols. The 128 ASCII characters are encoded with a 7-bit number. Most computers (with a major exception being the IBM mainframes using EBCDIC) support ASCII encoding, though other encoding statements are native to many. See also: ISO
1. Asynchronous Transfer Mode. A new standard for very-high-speed network data transmission over long and short distances. Unlike most other transmission modes, ATM has no inherent transfer-rate limit.
2. Adobe Type Manager. A utility on Macintosh, Windows, and some Unix computers for rendering typefaces on screen. Adobe Acrobat requires this utility.
The physical connection between two or more local area networks (LANs). A backbone is often composed of fiber-optic cables or other high-speed transport media. See also WAN.
A way to describe network capacity. If you've got a T-3 leased-line, you've got a high-bandwidth connection. If you've got a 9,600 bps modem, you've got a low-bandwidth connection. If you want to use digital video, you need a high bandwidth.
Colloquially, the word baud is used in the term "baud rate", which describes how many bits per second a modem can send or receive. The technical definition of baud refers to the numbers of times per second a carrier signal changes value.
Bulletin Board System. Usually a single computer, with a limited number of incoming telephone lines, that provides messaging, chat, and file-transfer services to members. Some are pay services; others are free. Bulletin boards were the main means of online exploration before the explosive growth of the Internet.
Binary Hexadecimal. Internet e-mail can generally only handle ASCII. BinHex converts binary, non-text Macintosh files (non-ASCII) into e-mail-friendly ASCII.
Binary Digit. A single binary unit, the basis of digital computing. A bit has a value of 1 or 0. Digital communications speeds are usually measured in terms of bits per second. See Also: Bandwidth, Bps, Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte
Because It's Time Network. An early network of educational sites sharing e-mail services. Most BITNET machines are now on the Internet, and the utility of the BITNET itself has diminished to near zero.
Bits per second. A standard measurement of digital transmission speeds. A 28.8 modem will transfer 28,800 bits in one second.
Chances are good that you're using a browser to look at this document. A browser, in most current usage, is any client software that is used for looking at World Wide Web resources. There are other kinds of browsers, too -- for example, image catalogs on CDs are accessed through image-database browsers. Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer and Mosaic are browsers. So is Lynx.
A series of 8 bits (e.g. 11111111) that represent a single character. Languages with large character sets like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean require two bytes (e.g. 10101010 11111111) to represent their characters. Disk space is represented in terms of bytes used.
Centre européen pour la recherche nucléaire (European Center for Nuclear Research). The original home of the World Wide Web, Geneva's CERN developed Web protocols as a means for scientific researchers to exchange documents easily.
Common Gateway Interface. A means for adding functionality to the World Wide Web through scripting. Among other things, CGI scripts can pull records out of an external database. Whenever you run a search on the Internet, you are likely to be using a CGI script.
A software application that interacts with a server application. In the case of the World Wide Web, a browser client, like Netscape Navigator, will request a file over the Internet from a server program.
Client/Server is the organizational model for the newer generation of computing. Instead of a host computer running all applications and feeding information to users via dumb terminals, an application on the user's local machine -- the client -- requests and stores information from, and on, the server, but then does much of the processing locally.
A means for determining how long an HTML file stays in the client browser window before it is refreshed or replaced. Client pull is used, among other things, for routing users from one page to another.
See MIME.
Central Processing Unit. The brains of the computer, the device that processes most information in the computer.
The nebulous domain that is inhabited by computers and networks. Originated in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer.
The unique name for each Internet site. The "top level" of a domain name is the last part, always two or three letters. In the United States, the top-level domains are .com (for commercial organizations), .org (for non-profit organizations), .net (for network providers), .gov (for the Federal government), and .mil (for the military). In other countries, two-letter ISO-standard codes represent each country, e.g. .fr for France, .de for Germany, .uk for the United Kingdom, .ca for Canada, .jp for Japan, and so forth. There are exceptions: .us is occasionally used, especially by municipal and state governments, and foreign companies are allowed access to the .com and .net top-level domains.
The hierarchy for domain names is represented from right to left. After the top-level domain name come the various sub-domain names. A domain name generally represents one computer. Users' workstations may have their own domain names, or they may simply be assigned IP addresses.
"Virtual" domain names also exist. These may be aliases to other machines, or they may simply point to a directory on a large host machine that serves as a mail or Web server. This is often done for small businesses and individuals who want to have a presence on the Internet but who do not want to have to set up a physical site.
Domain Name Server. A piece of software sitting on a server computer that resolves domain names to actual IP addresses. For example, if you wanted to open an Internet telephone call with Morty Miller, whose workstation domain name was mortym.bigcorp.com, you would enter mortym.bigcorp.com. The DNS would determine that mortym.bigcorp.com actually represented the address 158.204.12.78. The DNS would then transmit that IP address to your computer; and your computer would initiate the telephone call. Nodes communicate with each other using IP addresses rather than domain names, though users may never see the actual IP addresses being used.
Disk Operating System. Shortened from MS-DOS, this is Microsoft's operating system that sits behind Windows 3.1. Developed by Microsoft and licensed to IBM and its clone vendors, this was the predominant PC operating system from the early 1980's to the mid-1990's. If you're angry about your 8-character-long filenames, blame DOS, not Windows.
Electronic Mail. Electronic communications, sending text messages. Non-text binary files can also be sent (see MIME). E-mail extends to networks that are not part of the Internet, such as BBSs and proprietary online services. See also: SMTP, UUCP
One of the most common local area network (LAN) wiring schemes, Ethernet has a transmission rate of 10 Megabits per second; a newer standard called Fast Ethernet will carry 100 Megabits per second.
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Frequently Asked Questions. FAQs are text files, posted to Usenet newsgroups, mailing lists, or World Wide Web pages, that have answers to the most commonly asked questions on a particular subject. Although they are often technical in nature (e.g. QuarkXPress FAQ, Gas Chromatography FAQ, etc.), they may exist on any topic under the sun (Esperanto FAQ, Elvis FAQ). If you ask a question on any given subject, you may be referred to the FAQ first.
Fiber Distributed Data Interface. A fiber-optic cabling standard for LANs and WANs, FDDI carries up to 100 Megabits per second.
A non-Internet e-mail network, based on small BBSs communicating with each other. FidoNet users can exchange e-mail with the Internet, and vice versa.
A leased line capable of transferring 56,000 bps. Often used to connect small-to-medium networks to the Internet, 56K lines are no longer viewed as the high-capacity pipes they once were considered to be.
A small software tool that allows a client to query a server for information on users. Different servers return different types of results; and some servers do not allow Finger requests at all. For example, the command
finger @mit.edu
will return general information about MIT, while
finger @world.std.com
will return a list of users logged into world.std.com. Users may store a text file on their server called ".plan" which will be displayed whenever a user fingers them.
A method for protecting Internet-connected enterprise networks from break-ins by unauthorized outsiders. Firewalls add significant maintenance headaches to networks, make some Internet services inaccessible to users within the firewall, and do not allow Internet packets to be passed through en route to other destinations. Networks behind firewalls therefore place demands on Internet capacity but do not add their resources to the Internet as a whole.
A noun or verb, flame is the vicious verbal treatment of one Internet user at the hands of another. Flames are sometimes issued at the slightest provocation -- especially on the more degenerate Usenet newsgroups like alt.skinhead -- but most users show restraint in savaging others.
Software developed by individuals or small companies that costs nothing to use. The developer retains the copyright to the product, so freeware is not in the public domain. Many Internet utilities are freeware or shareware.
File Transfer Protocol. FTP is the most common method for transfering files over the Internet. When you want to upload your new Web pages to your server, for example, you send them using FTP. Some FTP sites -- notably university shareware/freeware archives, and software company archives -- allow you to log on anonymously to retrieve public files. There are numerous FTP clients for each operating system -- some using a graphical interface, others require commands to be typed in.
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A gateway is a dedicated computer or piece of software that translates among different protocols -- usually e-mail or networking protocols. An AOL-to-SMTP e-mail gateway, for example, converts America Online e-mail to the SMTP standard for transmission across the Internet.
Traditionally a term of derision, geek has come to have a more positive connotation in this computer age. Technically adept people now frequently refer to themselves as geeks, in a mixture of self-deprecation and pride.
Graphics Interchange Format. One of the two major graphics file formats on the Web. GIF may be headed for extinction, due both to technical obsolescence and patent disputes. GIF is a "lossless" compression method, but is limited to 256 colors (8-bit color). GIF files have the extension .gif. See also JPEG.
A billion bytes. A thousand megabytes. Workstations now often have one- or two-gigabyte hard drives. Some servers have mass storage measured in terabytes.
Gopher is an Internet-browsing client that was especially popular before the advent of the World Wide Web. You use your Gopher client to log into a Gopher server and then navigate by clicking on hierarchical directory links. Gopher is especially useful for obtaining news and weather reports. Most World Wide Web browsers allow users to access Gopher servers. It was developed at the University of Minnesota.
Graphical User Interface. Pronounced "gooey." The icons, windows, and toolbars through which a user controls a piece of software or operating system. All major operating systems now have some sort of GUI, either as an add-on (DOS's Windows 3.1, Unix's X-Windows) or integrated into the operating system (Mac OS, Windows NT). GUI was a revolutionary change from traditional command-line interfaces. The concept was pioneered by Xerox, which developed early GUIs at its Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970's; and it was first successfully marketed in the mid-1980's by Apple, with its Macintosh operating system.
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A large computer that is accessed for remote services. Host is a bit of an old-fashioned, mainframe-computer term, and has become something of a synonym for server. Terminals are used for connecting to hosts.
Hypertext Markup Language. The page-coding language for the World Wide Web. Every page that you see on the Web is represented in HTML, whether it was written by a human or by a computer. HTML is relatively simple: you turn attributes on and off using "tags"; and you create graphics and text hyperlinks to pages or files anywhere else on the Internet. HTML pages are viewed using a World Wide Web client program such as Netscape or Mosaic. HTML files end in the file extension .html or .htm.
Hypertext Transport Protocol. The protocol for serving files on the World Wide Web, HTTP is what browsers and clients use to send and get files. The string http:// makes up the first part of the URL for all World Wide Web pages.
Text linked to other text or other documents. Apple Computer was an early pioneer in hypertext, publishing an easy-to-program application called HyperCard. The World Wide Web is based upon hypertext links. Clicking on any underlined text in a Web document will prompt your browser to request another resource: another part of the same document, another document, or another file, such as an image or sound. The ability to link resources in this way is what makes the WWW so easy to navigate.
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See ISMAP.
The "world's biggest network". The worldwide net of networks and subnetworks. Every node on the Internet runs TCP/IP. Some resources associated with the Internet, such as Usenet, do not necessarily operate directly over the Internet. See also ARPAnet.
The name for Microsoft's World Wide Web browser.
Internet Explorer has been gaining ground on Netscape's Navigator. An increasing number of Web authors are writing their pages so that they work with IE as well as the Netscape Navigator browser.
The unique network address used by TCP/IP. A unique
number consisting of 4 numbers between 0 and 255 punctuated by dots, e.g.
167.241.33.40
Every computer running TCP/IP has its own unique IP number. Many computers
are also assigned domain names, which are easier
to remember.
Internet Relay Chat. A popular medium for online "chats", IRCs are the Internet version of chat forums on America Online, CompuServe, and other online services. Users join IRC channels and type messages in real-time to each other. Everybody can see what everybody else in the channel is typing.
Integrated Services Digital Network. A technology that has been around for a while but which is only just beginning to take off. ISDN is digital telephone service that can run over the same copper cables used for the old-fashioned analog telephone network. An ISDN line is capable of carrying data and voice simultaneously. Data users generally enjoy a transfer rate of 56,000 bits per second, though it is possible to use both the data and voice channels for data and increase transfer rates. ISDN hardware is still a limiting factor for home users, due to its relatively high cost: $250 - $1000.
Also called "imagemap". An image, displayed in a World-Wide Web browser window, that has certain regions mapped out as links to other Web documents. ISMAP requests are processed by CGI scripts sitting on the remote server.
International Organization for Standardization. Organization based in Geneva that publishes standards in industry and technology. ISO-8859 is a superset of character encoding sets, capable of representing all European languages. ISO-8859-1, also known as ISO-Latin-1, is used for encoding English.
Internet Service Provider. A company that allows home and corporate users to connect to the Internet. The connection may be part-time PPP or SLIP (for home users), or it may be a full-time ISDN, T-1, or T-3 connection (for companies and clients running full-time servers).
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Sun Microsystems' new programming language, based on C++ is used to develop "applets" that load from WWW sites. Identical Java applets can be used on any supported platform -- that is, a Macintosh machine will run the same code as a Unix machine or a Windows NT machine.
An implementation of the Java programming language that allows non-programmers to build Java-based applications easily.
Joint Photographic Experts' Group. A standard for photographic image compression. JPEG is a "lossy" compression method, which discards data from an image and interpolates the surrounding area. JPEG is also used for compressing frames of the QuickTime movie format, although it is gradually being replaced by MPEG for motion-picture compression. JPEG is capable of storing 24-bit images (millions of colors). JPEG files on the Web have the extension .jpeg or .jpg. See also: GIF
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Literally, a thousand bytes, but actually 1,024 bytes. See also: Bit, Megabyte, Gigabyte, Terabyte
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Local Area Network. A network of computers that is usually confined to one office building. LANs are linked together in larger networks as Wide Area Networks (WANs).
A special-purpose telephone line that is used exclusively for high-speed digital transmission, leased lines are necessary for linking larger networks to the Internet. T-1 and T-3 are run on leased lines. Leased lines are maintained at a much higher service level than are regular voice lines, and are consequently very expensive to rent. Leased lines may be composed either of copper wire or fiber-optic cable.
Listserv is the most common form of mailing list. Listserv lists originated on the BITNET, but most now run over the Internet.
A freeware version of Unix, Linux is becoming popular among techno-geeks as a powerful, low-cost operating system for operating servers.
To "log in" is to gain access to a protected computer. As a noun, login is the Unix term for account name.
An early World Wide Web browser, Lynx is text-only. Though most early World Wide Web pages were easily comprehensible when viewed with text-only browsers, the Web's increasing dependence on graphics makes solutions like Lynx more and more unworkable -- much to the detriment of the visually impaired, who use text-to-speech software to "read" online text.
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The operating system behind Apple Macintosh computers and their clones. The first major operating system to implement a graphical user interface (GUI). Like Windows NT and 95, a 32-bit operating system.
An automated e-mail group mailing list. They are often supported by software vendors or user groups to disseminate information on a regular basis. Mailing lists tend to be somewhat more serious than the more anarchical discussion groups on the Usenet.
A million bits. Transmission speed over local area networks (LANs) is often measured in terms of Megabits per second (Mbps).
A million bytes. A thousand (1,024, to be exact) kilobytes. Hard-disk space is usually given in megabytes -- but disks are getting bigger, and may be measured in gigabytes or -- on very large server volumes -- terabytes.
Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. The standard for sending non-text file attachments via e-mail. Any non-text files -- images, sounds, formatted word-processing documents, etc. -- are represented in binary digits, rather than in ASCII. Since e-mail is transmitted in ASCII, the binary information must be encoded so that it can be sent as ASCII information. A MIME-compliant e-mail application is capable of sending binary files, encoded into ASCII, to any other MIME-compliant e-mail application.
MIME-encoded files always include a standard header describing the type of file enclosure. These content-types allow the recipient's program to determine what to do with the incoming file.
MIME content-types are also used on the World Wide Web. When a browser client requests a document from a server, the server transmits a MIME content-type along with the file. The content-type instructs the browser client what to do with the document: display it in the browser window, or launch a helper application to display it.
Modem
Modulator/demodulator. A modem allows users to connect to other users over telephone lines. Since standard phone lines carry only analog signals, a modem is needed to convert between digital information and analog signal. It accomplishes this by converting 1's and 0's to oscillating tones -- thus the pulsing, shrieking sound that you hear when you hear a modem initiating a connection.
Developed as freeware at NCSA, Mosaic was the first graphical World Wide Web browser. It quickly lost prominence when Mark Andreessen, its principal developer, left NCSA to form Netscape. The source code for Mosaic has been licensed to other software companies; most online services' browsers are based on some Mosaic code.
Motion Pictures Experts Group. An evolving standard for digital video compression. Often used for creating movie files seen on the World Wide Web. See also JPEG
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National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The home of Mosaic, the original Web browser. It is located on the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign campus.
"Proper" etiquette on the Internet. This may consist of not flooding newsgroups with spam, or being tolerant of naive newbies.
A denizen of the Internet.
The colloquial name for the premier World Wide Web browser (which is actually called "Netscape Navigator"), and the name of the company that publishes it.
Netscape has quickly become the de facto standard-setter for the World Wide Web. Most Web authors write their pages to take advantage of the Netscape Navigator browser; Netscape's server software (Netscape Communications Server and Netscape Commerce Server) are extremely successful commercial server packages; and Netscape Navigator is the first browser to support Sun Microsystems' Java and JavaScript cross-platform development languages.
Netscape Communications Corporation is the brainchild of Jim Clark, a former Silicon Graphics executive, and Mark Andreessen, the principal developer of Mosaic at NCSA. Netscape now occupies Wall Street legend, because when it was first offered for public sale in August 1995, Netscape stock gained three times its opening value on the first day.
Any collection of two or more computers connected together, sharing hardware or software, is a network. LAN is a formal term for a smaller network, and WAN is a formal term for a larger network. The Internet is sometimes referred to as "the world's biggest network."
A newcomer to the Internet. Or simply a new user of any particular software application.
The name for discussion groups on Usenet. Newsgroups are arranged in a hierarchical fashion opposite to that used for domain names. For example, the group alt has thousands of groups and subgroups with names like alt.fan, alt.fan.elvis, alt.fan.elvis.forever, alt.fan.elvis.songs. There is a Usenet newsgroup for every subject imaginable. Some of them contain extremely useful or interesting information -- they can often be a great source for technical support information, for example -- but the majority of newsgroups are filled with worthless blabber. See also Spam.
Network Information Center. An office that assigns domain names on the Internet. Generally, each top-level domain has a NIC. In the United States, the InterNIC assigns all high-level domain names ending with .com, .org, .net, .gov, .mil, and .us. Lower-level domain names are usually assigned by local network administrators.
A single computer on a network.
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A closed, pay-to-use system for e-mail, chat groups, newsgroups, and the like. Online services are much like overgrown BBSs in that one owner controls all the content. Although online services are largely responsible for the initial growth in interest in the Internet, they are beginning to lose customers, who see the Internet as more open, more interesting, and cheaper -- though not always for the faint-of-heart (technically or emotionally). The best-known online services are America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy.
Operating system. The software that controls the operations of a computer. Think of the OS as the fuel that runs the "engine" (the CPU). The operating systems an everyday user is likely to come into contact with are Mac OS, Unix, DOS, 32-bit Windows, and OS/2. There are numerous other operating systems, such as VAX/VMS, VM, and AS/400, that run only on large mainframe computers.
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Data is broken up into packets before being transmitted over the Internet. One file could be broken up into, say, five packets. Each of those five packets could travel over five different paths before reaching its destination. This decentralized approach is at the heart of the way that the Internet functions.
Portable Document Format. The file format used by Adobe Acrobat.
A UNIX-based scripting language that is often used on the World Wide Web. When you submit a complex form from your browser window, for example, the processing of the information may be handled by a Perl script. Perl scripts usually end in the extension .pl.
Pretty Good Privacy. An open data-encryption standard written by Phil Zimmermann. PGP encrypts documents using the RSA encryption algorithm. PGP is prohibited from export by the US Government.
A piece of software, often written by a third-party software developer, that loads in conjunction with a host application and extends the functionality of that application. Sometimes called "extension."
1. Point of Presence. A network service provider maintains a POP to which users connect in order to gain access to the Internet. Home users will use modems to dial up to POPs, and larger businesses will have leased-line connections to their local POPs.
2. Post Office Protocol. The protocol used by single-user e-mail software to upload and download e-mail messages to and from an e-mail server. Programs like Eudora and Pegasus use the POP3 protocol to talk to a wide variety of e-mail servers. POP's utility lies in its flexibility and extremely wide acceptance.
1. A physical connection to a computer through which data flows. An "Ethernet port", for example, is where Ethernet network cabling plugs into a computer.
2. The process of translating software written for one operating system so that it will run under another operating system. The current version of Microsoft Word for the Mac, for example, is a "Windows port" -- that is, the program was written for Windows and then re-engineered, using most of the original source code, for the Macintosh.
3. A logical entry to a server machine. These ports are mostly invisible to the user, though you may occasionally see a URL with a port number included, as in:
http://www.barfly.com:1066/
These ports do not refer to physical locations; they are set up by server administrators for network trafficking.
A message distributed to a newsgroup.
Point to Point Protocol. Allows a home, dial-up user to connect to the Internet using a regular modem.
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An Internet-based application, often used as a plug-in to Web browsers, that allows for real-time transmission of audio (e.g., radio broadcasts).
Robots on the Internet have little to do with the mechanized beasts of science-fiction movies. They automate time-consuming tasks that humans don't like to do, such as gathering database information or checking the validity of hypertext links.
Routers are network hardware or software that serve as transport points between different networks. They provide trafficking and filtering functions.
Read The F***ing Manual. What less-than-nice people may write in newsgroups or mailing lists when a user asks a software question that could have been resolved by reading the manual first. MIT keeps a collection of FAQs at rtfm.mit.edu.
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A special software/hardware implementation that allows users to search the World Wide Web for information based on keywords and other search criteria. The search engine is one of the most useful aspects of the World Wide Web. Some of the major ones are InfoSeek, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, Webcrawler, and Yahoo.
Some search engines find pages through robots that regularly crawl the Web, building databases of information on current pages. Others solely index items that have been submitted manually. Many search engines use both methods.
Server is a generic term for hardware or software that provides services to clients on a network. A network file server gives users on a network access to shared hard-disk volumes. A World Wide Web server gives Internet users access to documents on that server's volume. A mail server distributes mail to individual users within a local area network.
Modern computing is increasingly based upon the client/server model.
A technique used for animation within Web windows. The server will force-refresh a particular image on the page, creating an animated effect. Server push works poorly over slow networks.
Software, usually developed by a small company or an individual, that is distributed via the Internet, online services, and CD-ROMs, and which costs very little (usually $10-$50) to use. Payment of shareware fees is based on the honor system, although an increasing number of shareware programs allow use of the software for a short time, after which the software will fail to function unless the user pays for the software. Many Internet utilities are shareware or freeware.
A plug-in written by Macromedia that allows interactive multimedia presentations to play in a World Wide Web browser window.
Secure Hypertext Transmission Protocol. A standard used for transferring secure documents over the World Wide Web. S-HTTP relies upon the RSA encryption algorithm. Presently S-HTTP is used mostly for credit-card purchases over the Web. Pages using this protocol have a URL starting with https:// .
Serial Line Internet Protocol. A standard for connecting to the Internet via a modem and a regular dial-up telephone line. Gradually being replaced by PPP.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. The predominant transport protocol for Internet e-mail. Has mostly replaced the slower, older protocol UUCP. Many enterprise e-mail systems use other protocols that must be translated into SMTP by gateways when being sent over the Internet.
To spam is to flood Usenet newsgroups or mailing lists with unwanted, unsolicited information. A spam may be advertising material, a get-rich-quick scheme, or a paranoid rant.
A Silicon Valley hardware and software company, one of the major players in the high-end Unix workstation market. Sun is the developer of Java, the new programming language for the Internet. Sun supports two flavors of Unix: SunOS and Solaris.
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A leased-line data connection with a maxiumum capacity of 1.544 Megabits per second. This is the most common type of leased data line.
Fractional T-1 allows users who do not require the capacity of full T-1 to lease one or more of the 24 channels of 64,000 bytes per second each that T-1 can be broken up into.
A leased-line data connection with a maximum capacity of 44.736 Megabits per second. A T-3 connection is extremely expensive to maintain, and is reserved for only the largest network installations.
As with T-1, fractional T-3 is available, providing a portion of a T-3 pipe for a fraction of the cost of a full T-3 connection.
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. The suite of protocols under which all the computers on the Internet communicate with each other. TCP/IP was best known as the standard UNIX networking protocol, but some implementation of TCP/IP is now available for every major operating system. To truly be on the Internet, a computer must be running TCP/IP; but a computer running TCP/IP is not necessarily on the Internet.
It is now possible to have a telephone conversation or videoconference between two or more Internet-connected workstations. Although performance is acceptable over high-speed links, teleconferencing's quality is heavily dependent upon Internet traffic. At high-traffic times, connections are usually of mediocre quality.
The application used to login to a remote host. Using Telnet, a user in the US can log into a coputer in Japan and use it in the same manner as a user in Japan would use it. Telnet allows your computer to emulate a terminal. You can also telnet from a dumb terminal to a remote host.
A trillion bytes. Very large server volumes -- especially those stored on optical media like recordable CD's -- may be measured in terms of terabytes. See also bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte.
The traditional piece of computer hardware for using network services. Terminals usually have minimal computing function, being completely dependent upon their host, and are often referred to as "dumb terminals." Personal computers can emulate terminal functions for the purpose of connecting to mainframe hosts. Telnet is a tool that makes your personal computer appear as a terminal to a host.
A piece of hardware that allows dial-up connections to enter a network. An Internet service provider will have a rack of terminal servers, each connected to a rack of modems, that answer incoming data calls. The terminal server provides network routing from the modem lines to the network.
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A very fast, stable, but somewhat difficult-to-use operating system, Unix has been the predominant platform for servers on the Internet. There are dozens of different "flavors" of Unix. Some of the major ones are SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, AIX, HP-UX, OSF, SCO, NeXTSTEP, Linux.
Uniform Resource Locator. The address of any document or other resource on the Internet. URLs always start with a protocol name, like http, ftp, gopher, or telnet, for example, and then usually list the resource's domain name and file path. A typical World Wide Web URL goes like this:
http://www.bigyellow.com/
A URL for a particular file on an FTP site would be similar to this:
ftp://ftp.foodsoft.com/pub/food/fried-eggs-304.sit.hqx
Some non-standard URLs are used for launching other applications that access information over the Internet. A couple of examples of these are netphone://, for one company's Internet telephony application, and FMP3://, for accessing FileMaker Pro 3 databases.
A worldwide network of non-real-time discussion groups. Your local news server probably receives a Usenet "feed" from thousands of Usenet newsgroups. Usenet is transmitted using the old UUCP e-mail protocol, and not all newsgroups are necessarily carried over the Internet. The Usenet is aggressively defended by its protectors as one of the few havens of true free speech, and Usenet newsgroups often come under attack in many parts of the world. In the United States some newsgroups have been censored because of pornographic material disseminated over them; in Europe they have come under fire for spreading right-wing hate propaganda. See also: Newsgroup
Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol. An older protocol for sending e-mail between different Unix machines via regularly scheduled modem and network connections. This is the technology utilized by the Usenet for transmitting news postings. Most Internet mail servers now use the SMTP protocol instead.
A method for encoding binary information into ASCII data. This is how e-mailers that do not use the MIME protocol must transfer binary information (e.g., file attachments).
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Virtual Reality Modeling Language. Pronounced -- if you're inclined to pronounce abbreviations -- "vermal." A nascent standard for platform-independent three-dimensional description, VRML can be thought of as the HTML of 3-D. Developed partially at Silicon Graphics, the company that brought you the dinosaurs in the movie Jurassic Park.
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Wide Area Information Server. Pronounced "ways."Software that builds searchable databases from various types of Internet resources.
Wide Area Network. A larger network, usually consisting of a collection of LANs, that spans a large geographical area. Nodes on WANs speak to each other over a backbone.
The predominant desktop operating environment. Quickly ceding its place to the next generation of Windows, NT and 95 (see below). Called "16-bit" because the software speaks to the processor in 16-bit "words." The operating system in Windows 3.1 is actually DOS.
The next generation of operating systems from Microsoft. NT is predominantly used for servers, while 95 is mainly for workstations. Unlike Windows 3.1, both 32-bit versions of Windows are actual operating systems.
Protocol for implementing TCP/IP on Windows computers.
The collection of resources across the Internet that is accessed using World Wide Web browsers. It is an effective means for tying together very different types of resources that are scattered across servers all over the world.
World Wide Web (see). Also, in lowercase, the most common domain-name prefix for World Wide Web servers, e.g. www.netscape.com.
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The main standard for implementing a graphical user interface (GUI) on Unix computers.
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