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An Internet is a network of
networks and a set of protocols (rules) for transmitting and exchanging data
between networks. In the most maximal
sense, however, it has become a worldwide community, a global village, but also
a repository of global information resources.
Internet is the most
valuable legacy left over from the Cold War.
It originally came into being, as the ARPA Net, which was founded by the
U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Project Agency (ARPA) to link academic
research centres involved in military research.
In 1957, ARPA was founded in
response to the former Soviet Union Launching Sputnik. In 1963, ARPA asked the Rand Corporation to
ponder how to form a command and
control network capable of
surviving attack by atomic bombs. The
Rand Corporation’s response (made public in 1964) was that the network would
“have no central authority” and would be “designed from the beginning to
operate while in tatters”.
These two basic concepts
become the defining characteristics of what eventually became the
Internet. The owners of each individual
network (whether it is a Local Area Network LAN) linking machines in one
building to the Internet, or a regional Wide Area Network (WAN) providing
Internet access for computers across a whole state or the whole Country) make
their own decisions about whether to connect and what services they will allow
their users to assess. In so
connecting, they are responsible for their own small part of the Internet, and
the associated costs.
Internet is considered to be
somewhat anarchic because of the lack of control or regulation. It leads to a lot of duplication of services
with no authoritative source of information about who is connected and what is
available on the Internet.
But it also means that no
one person, group or country has the ability to censor or restrict access to
the Internet’s resources. This has led
to it being referred to as the cornerstone of a possible future electronic
democracy.
Various resources are
available on the Internet. The use of
the Internet is vast and incorporates many facets of life. Even the briefest of visits to the Internet
should convince you that the wealth of information is staggering.
Existing on the Internet are
major companies, such as COINMAC, Microsoft, Netscape and Shell. They enhance their operations using the
Internet. Discussion groups also exist
on the Internet and the matter discussed on it knows no limit.
Any weird and wild topics
possible belong to a discussion group somewhere on the Internet. Subject matter ranges from technical topics
to folk arts to insect. The Internet is
an encyclopaedia of topics.
It is important to
understand the technology of the Internet, so as to have a firm grasp of
it. The intention is not to expose the
technical sophistication of the Internet, but to give the basics of such things
as TCP/IP and Domain Name System (DNS).
The Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is a software-based communications protocol
used in networking. Though the name
TCP/IP implies that the entire scope of the product is a combination of two
protocols, it is usually a single entity that does not combine two protocols,
but a larger set of software programs that provide network services such as
remote logins, remote file transfers and electronic mail.
TCP/IP provides a method for
transferring information from one machine to another and handles errors in
transmission, manage the routing and delivery of dam, and control the actual
transmission by the use of pre-determined status signals.
A Domain Name System
represents a hierarchy, starting with the most general word on the right and
moving to the most specific on the left.
It can include a country code, an organisation code and a site name.
For instance my name. Com.
av., reading from right to left, specifies the name of a site in Australia
(“au”) in the commercial (“Com”0 subcategory “Myname”. Every country connected to the Internet has
its own code, such as “UK” (United Kingdom), “ca” (Canada), “fr” (France), “nz”
(New Zealand), and so forth.
The country code for the United States is “US” Most sites in the U.S. don’t however include the country because the Internet began in the U.S. and the country codes were created later, after the Internet became a global phenomenon.
The Internet offers access
to data, graphics, sound, software, text, and people through a variety of
services and tools for communication and data exchange. The non-exhaustive list of services includes
Remote Login (Using the CPU of a designated computer on the Internet), File
Tranfer Protocol (where any file on the Internet may be transferred from a
remote computer to yours and vice-versa), Electronic Mail (E-mail) – sending
messages to any computer on the Internet the messages are delivered to the
addressee, but handled by any number of computers along the way. News items are similarly exchanged, the
difference being that news has expiry date and thus automatically deleted after
a designated period.
You can connect to the Internet
in one of two ways:- Dial-up account
with an ISP (Internet Service Provider) or Leased line to an ISP. A new development now, however, is the radio
system which allows subscribers within 10km radius of the server to connect to
the internet. In this case NITEL telephone line is nit required for Internet
Connection.
Everyone who can receive an E-mail message would usually have an E-mail address. The address is usually written in the form rules @ Kingdom.domain. The (at) symbol separates the user part on the left, from the domain part on the right. This addressing format is useful for the Computer in delivering the mail, but may not be useful for we humans. We usually will want to associate the real names of the users with their e-mail address.
It is possible to combine
the E-mail address with the real name of the user. For example, the E-mail address stone@ieng.com.ac.uk belongs to Mr. stone.
Components of an E-mail
message:- All E-mall messages should have the
following components – author’s address (From), recipient address (To), carbon
copy (cc), subject, Attachments and message body (the actual mail being sent
should be typed into this field).
Mr. Salam is the chief
executive officer of Computer and Information Management Centre (COINMAC),
Ibadan.