Web Site Index

Home
About Me
Contact Me

- Basic Info -

> WWW Basics <
Interactive Web
Online Security
Glossary

- Advanced Info -

Just for Fun
Binary Computation

---

WWW Basics

Does the internet make you feel like a lone prairie-dog amid the vast expanse of the Great Plains?  Do you find the www (world wide web, a.k.a. the internet) confusing, insignificant, or just plain intimidating?  While these reactions are clearly understandable -- and they are shared by many -- it can be easy to overcome these feelings, and discover what the internet may have to offer you by learning a few fundamentals.

Let's take a quick review of some of the topics that I will be covering in the 'basics' articles:

Table of Contents

1. Topics covered in this article:
   1. What is the internet?
   2. Where did the internet come from?
   3. What do some of these new terms mean? (a mini-glossary)
2. Topics covered in the next article, the Interactive Web:
   1. How do I search for information or a specific product?
   2. What is a forum, and how do I use one?
   3. What is chat, or instant messaging?
3. Topics covered in the final article, Online Security:
   1. What you probably didn't know you ought to know about online security!
   2. What are the major threats posed by the internet?

1. What is the internet?

First, let's address some potential confusion -- there are many terms that refer to the internet or aspects of the internet, from email, to web, to instant-messaging, and more, although the most common term is probably the web.  Technically, the web is one small aspect of the internet, but it's the most widely known and understood -- the web is the part of the internet you use when you utilize a program like Internet Explorer to go online.  I will expand upon the differences in my digest-version glossary of internet terminology, and as well, in the articles that I present here at this website.

Due to this oversimplification, just about any reference in the media (or around the water-cooler) to the internet may be characterized as being about "the web".  Again, the "web" is a small facet of the "internet".  The difference is mostly academic, and may be unimportant to you, so don't worry if you're not sure where the delineation lies between the various facets of the internet, and the whole.  Generally, I will refer to the facets or the whole of the internet by their proper terminology, but for a simplified understanding of the technologies you may continue to think of the various terms (WWW, web, email, etc...) as all being synonymous with "the internet".  From here on out, the first time I use one of these terms, the word will be underlined, and clicking it will take you to that entry in the glossary for an expanded definition.

Briefly, the internet is a combination of technology, theory, and computers that share common communication protocols and medium.  Now please, don't go and run away screaming just yet -- by the time I'm finished explaining it, the previous sentence will actually make sense to you; I promise!

As you are likely to be reading this page at your library, or on your home computer (or possibly at work? Don't worry, I won't tell), then that machine is actually a part of the internet!  In order to retrieve this page (which is stored on a server in North America) the computer you are at had to form a request in the common protocols, effectively "dial up" my server (just as you might call a friend and initiate a conversation) and ask for the page you are looking at -- the information, both the request from your computer as well as the response from my server, used the internet to exchange this information, much as you use the telephone system to carry on a conversation with someone far away.

The technical aspect of this type of transaction has nearly endless depths of technology and theory that make it work -- enough to fill a small library trying to describe it all (seriously), but it has been designed to remain transparent to the average user.  Allow me to draw a comparison with compact discs (music or audio disks)...

Much as the technology that allows a music distributor to manufacture audio CD's that you can listen to in your car or other stereo equipment has a plethora of complex layers of technology, yet (thankfully for most) all you need to know how to do is insert the CD and touch the play button... the rest of the details are insignificant to your ability to sit back and enjoy the music.  Similarly, you do not need to understand how the internet request is formed, or how it gets from your computer to my server and back, or how your computer translates the data into what you see on your screen (the human-readable form).  It just works, whether or not you know how it works.

There are, however, a couple of important differences... Due to the unique nature of the internet you should educate yourself to understand how to:

I'll be covering these details a little bit later on, but for the moment, let's go back to that leading statement that probably sounded like nonsense:

Now, let's step back from this barrage of techno-mumbo-jumbo briefly, and see...

< Return to the Table of Contents >

2. Where did the internet come from?

The embryonic version of the internet as we know it today was called ARPANET when it was built in the late 1960's and 70's (the contract with BBN and ARPA was established in 1969).  Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a means to ensure military communications during and after a nuclear attack, the first packet-switching-networks were implemented by BBN, a private-sector technological research company.  (There is actually some contention as to what the government's motivation was, but it is most widely believed to have been a cold-war instigated attempt to improve military communications).

Packet-switching allows data to be broken into smaller pieces and sent along the network without a static link, meaning that any two packets might find their way to their destination via different routes; this is in contrast with the "circuit switching" technology used to route telephone calls where there is a single defined circuit created between the two parties when a call is established.  This provided the type of fail-safe communications that the government of the USA was looking for.

During the 1970's and early 80's the ARPANET continued to grow not only in size, but also in functionality.  Email was born (in 1965, but the first email as we know it today, i.e. recipient@example.com was in 1971), as was the file transfer protocol (FTP, 1971), domain name service (DNS, 1983), and many of the underlying protocols were developed into what the internet uses today, including TCP/IP (transmission control protocol / internet protocol, 1981).

*** NOTE: The dates here are fuzzy, to say the least.  For example, the FTP specification from 1971 continued to change at a rapid pace until 1985 as it was continuously field-tested and revised, and to confuse the matter further the roots of the specification were born of earlier methods.  This is typical of the various internet protocol specifications.

In 1983 the internet was born.  Then, the protocol that drastically changed the internet and ushered it into the mainstream: hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP).  Tim Berners-Lee built the worlds first web server and released the specifications for the hypertext markup language (HTML) and HTTP in 1991.

The internet is not static in scope, design, or use -- it continues to evolve day-by-day.  In the last decade there has been a boom in internet-enabled gaming, peer-to-peer networking, voice over IP (VoIP), and there are always people inventing creative new ways to exploit the internet.

For a deeper look into what the internet is all about today, please continue to the Interactive Web article!

< Return to the Table of Contents >