What Is The Internet?

The Internet is a network of computer networks. Any computer on the Internet can talk to any other computer on the Internet.

The following services are available using the Internet: e-mail, chat groups, information retrieval, shopping, games, intranets/extranets and, of course, the world wide web.

The World Wide Web is many, many pages of information that are linked together. These pages are available on the networked computers that make up the Internet. When you look at a page on the web, you are looking at a computer file that is being run on a computer somewhere. This page will contain links to other pages. Clicking on a link will take you to another page (which may be on the same computer, or on another computer entirely.

Web pages are linked together using hyperlinks. These links are made using hypertext, a way of connecting information to make it easier to find. A web page may have hyperlinks from several other web pages (for example, a page on music could be accessed from the composer, the music style, the ballet it is used for etc). Hypertext is the system of interlinked pages.

This system is searchable. Programs called search engines find the web pages that contain words that match the search criteria you have entered.

Each web page has an address, sometimes called an URL(uniform research locater). This lets the web page be found. Addresses look like this: http://www.yahoo.com. Programs called browsers find web pages (using their addresses) and let you see the web pages on your computer screen.

Addresses are made up of various parts. The first bit is the scheme, which describes the way the pages are sent over the Internet. The most common scheme is http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Following this and the :// is the name of the computer that the page is on. This computer is called the host computer . An example of a host computer name is tech2u.com.au. The .au is the country code. Every country except America has a special code. The .com tells you who has this computer. Com is a company, edu is an educational institution, gov is the government etc. The whole name of the host computer is called a domain. These are the bare essentials of any address. After the domain there may be a slash followed by other names eg /comfile. This is the name of the resource on the computer, for example a computer file.

All these addresses on the Internet are actually numbers. The english words are there to make the addresses easier to remember. Each domain will have a domain name server, a computer that translates the number of the Internet address into the english equivalent, and vice versa.