1.

Introduction to Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. It is a network of networks

that consists of millions of private and public, academic, business, and government networks of
local to global scope that are linked by a broad array of electronic and optical networking
technologies.

Growth and Ownership of the Internet

The origins of the Internet reach back to the 1960s when the United States funded research projects
of its military agencies to build robust, fault-tolerant and distributed computer networks. This
research and a period of civilian funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science
Foundation spawned worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies
and led to the commercialization of an international network in the mid 1990s, and resulted in the
following popularization of countless applications in virtually every aspect of modern human life.
As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet.

The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for
access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching
definitions of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and
the Domain Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the
core protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-
profit organization of loosely-affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by
contributing technical expertise.

Anatomy of Internet

A study of the internet outlines the following major components of the structure:

• Internet services
• Elements of the internet
• Uniform Resource Locators
• Internet Protocol

Internet Services

Internet service Started Description

In
E-mail (Electronic mail) 1970 E-mail is the most common service of the Internet. It
can be used on old PCs also
Mailing Lists 1981 Mailing lists are a group-based messaging service.
Once subscribed, There are currently over 90,000
Internet mailing lists
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) 1973 An Internet service designed for transferring files
among computers. Files are available for downloading
on the Internet using FTP.

1. Introduction to Internet Page 1

Newsgroups (Usenet)
WWW (World Wide Web)
1979 Usenet is a public messaging and “bulletin board”
system. It comprises of more than 34,000 individual
forums, and each one pertains to a specific topic.
1992 This service features user- friendly publishing and
multimedia documents and files. Web pages are
created using HTML, JavaScript, and Java.

Element of Internet

A simplified hierarchical model of the Internet includes client PCs, server computers and networks
(composed of both clients and servers).

Clients PCs – These are the computers that request information from servers. Client computers
typically maintain intermittent (part- time) connections.

Server Computer – These are relatively powerful computer with a persistent (full – time) Internet
connection and can provide data to multiple client computers simultaneously.

Networks – These are composed of one or more server computers and multiple clients PCs.

Uniform Resource Locators

Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs, are the unique addresses of Internet resources. A URL is
divided into four parts as seen in figure

http://www.tabasco.com/html/Appendix.html

Transfer Server Name Directory Path

File Name
Protocol

Internet protocol (IP)

IP is a method by which data is sent from one computer to another over the network. Each
computer which is connected to the internet has at least one IP address which uniquely identifies
this computer from other computers.

World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known as The Web, is a system of
interlinked hypertext documents contained on the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web
pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them by
using hyperlinks.

Elements of the Web

Web Browser - A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing
information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content.
Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.

1. Introduction to Internet Page 2

Web Pages vs. Web sites – A web page is a part of complete web sites where web sites can consist
of only a few pages or many hundreds of Web pages.

Basic Internet Terminologies

Modem : The process of modulation and demodulation, that is the conversion of digital data to
analog form and vice versa is carried out by a special device called modem ( short form for
modulator – demodulator).

Internet Protocol: It is responsible for the addressing and sending data from one computer to
another computer.

Internet Information Server (IIS): It is a GROUP OF Internet servers (HTTP server and FTP
server).

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP): It uses a set of rules to exchange message with other
Internet points at the information packet level.

Internet Service Provider (ISP): An Internet service provider (ISP), also sometimes referred to
as an Internet access provider (IAP), is a company that offers its customers access to the Internet.

Netiquette

It is a collection of rules, standards that distinct the Internet from traditional forms of
communications such as telephone conversion, face to face meetings, paper based letters. It helps
you to avoid misunderstanding that may arise during communication accomplished via any Internet
services especially E-mail, chat and mailing lists, etc.

Internet Applications

E Commerce: Electronic commerce, commonly known as (electronic marketing) e-commerce or

eCommerce, consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such
as the Internet and other computer networks.

1. Introduction to Internet Page 3