A Brief Internet Glossary


Archie
A tool (software) for finding files stored on anonymous FTP sites. You need to know the exact file name or a sub-string of it.

ARPANet
(Advanced Research Projects Administration Network) -- The precursor to the Internet. Developed in the late 60's and early 70's by the US Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area networking that would survive a nuclear war.

Anonymous FTP
SeeFTP

ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) -- this is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111

Backbone
A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network. The term is relative as a backbone in a small network will likely be much smaller than many non-backbone lines in a large network.

Bandwidth
How much "stuff" you can send through a connection. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of english text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression.

Baud
In common usage the "baud rate" of a modem is how many bits it can send or receive per second. Technically "baud" is the number of times per second that the carrier signal shifts value - so a 2400 bit-per-second modem actually runs at 300 baud, but it moves 4 bits per baud (4 x 300 = 2400 bits per second).

BBS
(Bulletin Board System) -- A computerized meeting and announcement system that allows people to carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements without the people being connected to the computer at the same time. There are many thousands (millions?) of BBS's around the world, most are very small, running on a single IBM clone PC with 1 or 2 phone lines. Some are very large and the line between a BBS and a system like CompuServe gets crossed at some point, but it is not clearly drawn.

BITNET
(Because It's Time Network) -- A network of educational sites separate from the Internet, but e-mail is freely exchanged between BITNET and the Internet. Listservs, the most popular form of e-mail discussion groups, originated on BITNET. BITNET machines are IBM VMS machines, and the network is probably the only international network that is shrinking.

Bps
(Bits-Per-Second). A measurement of how fast data is moved from one place to another. A "28.8 modem" can move 28,800 bits per second.

Browser
A client program (software) that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.

Byte
A set of Bits that represent a single character. Usually there are 8 bits in a Byte, sometimes more, depending on how the measurement is being made.

Client
A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a Server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each Client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of Server programs, and each Server requires a specific kind of Client.

Cyberspace
Term originated by author William Gibson in his novel "Neuromancer", the word Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources available through computer networks.

E-mail
(Electronic Mail) -- Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another via computer. E-mail can also be sent automatically to a large number of addresses (Mailing List)

Ethernet
A very common method of networking computers in a LAN. Ethernet will handle about 10,000,000 bits-per-second and can be used with almost any kind of computer.

FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) -- FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject. There are hundreds of FAQs on subjects as diverse as Pet Grooming and Cryptography. FAQs are usually written by people who have tired of answering the same question over and over.

FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) -- A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name "anonymous", thus these sites are called "anonymous ftp servers".

Finger
An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests, but many do.

Gopher
A widely successful method of making menus of material available over the Internet. Gopher is a Client and Server style program, which requires that the user have a Gopher Client program. Although Gopher spread rapidly across the globe in only a couple of years, it is being largely supplanted by Hypertext, also known as WWW (World Wide Web). There are still thousands of Gopher Servers on the Internet and we can expect they will remain for a while.

Host
Any computer on a network that is a repository for services available to other computers on the network. It is quite common to have one host machine provide several services, such as WWW and USENET

HTML
(HyperText Markup Language) -- The coding language used create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web. HTML looks a lot like old-fashioned typesetting code, where you surround a block of text with codes that indicate how it should appear, additionally, in HTML you can specify that a block of text, or a word, is "linked" to another file on the Internet. HTML files are meant to be viewed using a World Wide Web Client program, such as Mosaic.

HTTP
(HyperText Transport Protocol) -- The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. Requires a HTTP client program on one end, and an HTTP server program on the other end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW).

Hypertext
Generally, any text that contains "links" to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed.

IRC
(Internet Relay Chat) -- Basically a huge multi-user live chat facility. There are a number major IRC servers around the world which are linked to each other. Anyone can create a "channel" and anything that anyone types in a given channel is seen by all others in the channel. Private channels can (and are) created for multi-person "conference calls".

ISDN
(Integrated Services Digital Network) -- Basically a way to move more data over existing regular phone lines. ISDN is only slowly becoming available in the USA but where it is available, it can provide speeds of 64,000 bits-per-second over a regular phone line at almost the same cost as a normal phone call.

Internet
The vast collection of inter-connected networks that all use the TCP/IP protocols and that evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early '70s. The Internet now (July 1995) connects roughly 60,000 independent networks into a vast global internet.

LAN
(Local Area Network) -- A computer network limited to the immediate area, usually the same building or floor of the building.

Listserv
The most common kind of maillist , Listervs originated on BITNET but they are now common on the Internet

Login
Noun or a verb. Noun: The account name used to gain access to a computer system. Not a secret (contrast with Password)
Verb: The act of entering into a computer system, e.g. "Login to the WELL and then go to the GBN conference."

MUD
(Multi-User Dungeon or Dimension) -- A (usually text-based) multi-user simulation environment. Some are purely for fun and flirting, others are used for serious software development, or education purposes and all that lies in between. A significant feature of most MUDs is that users can create things that stay after they leave and which other users can interact with in their absence, thus allowing a "world" to be built gradually and collectively.

Maillist (or Mailing List)
A (usually automated) system that allows people to send e-mail to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers to the maillist. In this way, people who have many different kinds of e-mail access can participate in discussions together.

Mosaic
The first WWW browser that was available for the Macintosh, Windows and UNIX all withthe same interface. "Mosaic" really started the popularity of the Web. The source-code to Mosaic has been licensed by several companies and there are several other pieces of software as good or better than Mosaic, most notably "Netscape".

Network
Any time you connected 2 or more computers together so that they can share resources you have a computer network. Connect 2 or more networks together and you have an internet.

Newsgroups
The name for discussion groups on Usenet .

Password
A code used to gain access to a locked system. Good passwords contain letters and non-letters and are not simple combinations such as "virtue7". A good password might be:
         Hot$l-6

PPP
(Point to Point Protocol) -- most well known as a protocol that allows a computer to use a regular telephone line and a modem to make a TCP/IP connection and thus be really and truly on the Internet . PPP is gradually replacing SLIP for this purpose.

Server (see Client)
A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. "Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out." A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different services to clients on the network .

SLIP
(Serial Line Internet Protocol) -- a standard for using a regular telephone line (a "serial line") and a modem to connect a computer as a real Internet site. SLIP is gradually being replaced by PPP .

TCP/IP
(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) -- This is the suite of protocols that defines The Internet . Originally designed for the UNIX operating system, TCP/IP software is now available for every major kind of computer operating system. To be truly on the Internet , your computer must have TCP/IP software.

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.

Terminal
A device that allows you to send commands to a computer somewhere else. At a minimum, this usually means a keyboard and a display screen and some simple circuitry. usually you will use terminal software in a personal computer - the software pretends to be ("emulates") a physical terminal and allows you to type commands to a computer somewhere else.

UNIX
A computer operating system (the basic software running on a computer, underneath things like word processors and spreadsheets). UNIX is designed to be used by many people at the same time (it is "multi-user") and has TCP/IP built-in. It is the most common operating system for servers on the Internet

URL
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) -- The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet that is part of the World Wide Web (WWW). A URL looks like this:

        http://www.matisse.net/seminars.html
or      telnet://well.sf.ca.us
or      news:new.newusers.questions
etc.

The most common way to use a URL is to enter into a WWW browser program, such as Netscape, or Lynx.

Usenet
A world-wide system of discussion groups, with comments passed among hundreds of thousands of machines. Not all Usenet machines are on the Internet , maybe half. Usenet is completely decentralized, with over 10,000 discussion areas, called newsgroups .

Veronica
(Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) -- Developed at the University of Nevada, Veronica is a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of gopher servers. The Veronica database can be searched from most major gopher menus.

WAIS
(Wide Area Information Servers) -- A commercial software package that allows the indexing of huge quantities of information, and then making those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet . A prominent feature of WAIS is that the search results are ranked ("scored") according to how relevant the "hits" are, and that subsequent searches can find "more stuff like that last batch" and thus refine the search process.

WWW (World Wide Web)
Two meanings - First, loosely used: The whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher , FTP , HTTP , telnet , Usenet , WAIS and some other tools. Second, the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers ) which are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files etc to be mixed together.

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