Going Back to Basics
Jaye C. Bautista
As much as there are tech savvy and techie women all over, there are still those who are down right clueless about any sort of techie stuff.
And we’re not talking computer language or programming here, ok. I know women who don’t have the faintest idea what the World Wide Web or a www dot address means. There was even one gal who thought that www was a radio station while another one thought it meant world wrestling or something.
I’ve also been asked to email my past articles because they missed the issue where I spoke about online chatting and the like or how to get started emailing and I often ask them to read our archives but there seems to be something wrong with the links on the net when they try to retrieve past articles on line, so I decided to do this special segment for the benefit of those aforementioned women, working or stay at home mommies (belated happy mom’s day to us all modern-day heroines!) who now are making a conscious effort to equip themselves with the latest info on technology. I would like to dedicate this feature on "Going back to the basics of internet usage." Let’s now enter our virtual classroom.
What is the Internet?
The Internet is a world-wide system of interconnected computers with an estimated 377 million users (as at September 2000).
There are several different ways to look at what the Internet actually is.
· At the highest level, the Internet is the people that use it - the global community of users.
· At another level, the Internet is a set of protocols that define the rules of how the computers will transfer information with one another.
At the lowest level, it is the hardware behind the computer networks - the computers, modems, phone lines and cables that link together to form a huge network.
Who Controls the Internet?
No one does. The Internet is a kind of anarchy. Everyone looks after their own little Internet ‘patch’, but no one is responsible for looking after it as a whole. It would be nearly impossible to control the Internet now - and trying to would certainly destroy it.
What is the World Wide Web?
The official definition of the WWW is "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."
Here are related terms:
Wide-area: The World Wide Web spans the whole globe.
Hypermedia: It contains various types of media (text, pictures, sound, movies ...) and hyperlinks that connect pages to one another.
Information retrieval: Viewing a WWW document (commonly called a Web page) is very easy thanks to the help of Web browsers. They allow you to retrieve pages just by clicking links, or entering addresses.
Universal access: It doesn’t matter what type of computer you have, or what type of computer the page you want is stored on - your Web browser allows you to connect seamlessly too many different systems.
Large universe of documents: Anyone can publish a Web page - and nearly anyone has! No matter what obscure information you want to find, there is bound to be someone out there who has written a Web page about it.
So what is the relationship between the WWW and the Internet? The World Wide Web is just one of the many services that the Internet provides. Some other services provided by the Internet are email, FTP, gopher, telnet and usenet, well, more on those next time.
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