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October 1995
Glossary of Internet Terms
By Sam Wood
The following is a list of various terms that people use when discussing the Internet.
ASCII
(American Standard Code for Information Interchange)--this is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes, each of which can be represented by a 7-digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.
BBS
(Bulletin Board System) A computerized meeting and announcement system that allows people to carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements without the people being connected to the computer at the same time. There are many thousands (millions?) of BBS's around the world, most are very small, running on a single IBM clone PC with 1 or 2 phone lines. Some are very large and the line between a BBS and a system like CompuServe gets crossed at some point, but it is not clearly drawn.
Binhex
(BINary HEXadecimal) a method for converting non-text files (non-ASCII) into ASCII. This is needed because Internet e-mail can only handle ASCII.
Browser
A client program (software) that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources.
Client
A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a Server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of Server programs, and each Server requires a specific kind of Client.
Domain Name
The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names always have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. A given machine may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one machine. Usually, all of the machines on a given network will have the same thing at the right-hand portion of their Domain Names, e.g.
gateway.network.com
mail.network.com
www.network.com
and so on. It is also possible for a Domain Name to exist but not be connected to an actual machine. This is often done so that a group or business can have an Internet e-mail address without having to establish a real Internet site. In these cases, some real Internet machines must handle the mail on behalf of the listed Domain Name.
E-mail
(Electronic Mail) Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another via computer. E-mail can also be sent automatically to a large number of addresses (Mailing List).
Eudora
This is an application that front-ends POP e-mail access and allows users to read off-line and save messages.
FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions) FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject. There are hundreds of FAQs on subjects as diverse as Pet Grooming and Cryptography. FAQs are usually written by people who have tired of answering the same questions over and over.
FTP
(File Transfer Protocol) A very common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible using the account name "anonymous", thus these sites are called "anonymous ftp servers".
Finger
An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests, but many do.
Gopher
A widely successful method of making menus of material available over the Internet. Gopher is a Client and Server style program, which requires that the user have a Gopher Client program. Although Gopher spread rapidly across the globe in only a couple of years, it is being largely supplanted by Hypertext, also known as WWW (World Wide Web). There are still thousands of Gopher Servers on the Internet and we can expect they will remain for a while.
HTML
(HyperText Markup Language) The coding language used to create on the Internet. PPP is gradually replacing SLIP for this purpose.
SLIP
(Serial Line Internet Protocol) a standard for using a regular telephone line (a "serial line") and a modem to connect a computer as a real Internet site. SLIP is gradually being replaced by PPP.
TCP/IP
(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) This is the suite of protocols that defines the Internet. Originally designed for the UNIX operating system, TCP/IP software is now available for every major kind of computer operating system. To be truly on the Internet, your computer must have TCP/IP software.
Telnet
The command and program used to login from one Internet site to another. The Telnet command/program gets you to the "login:" prompt of another host.
Terminal
A device that allows you to send commands to a computer somewhere else. At a minimum, this usually means a keyboard and a display screen and some simple circuitry. Usually you will use terminal software in a personal computer the software pretends to be ("emulates") a physical terminal and allows you to type commands to a computer somewhere else.
URL
(Uniform Resource Locator) The standard way to give the address of any resource on the Internet that is part of the World Wide Web (WWW). A URL looks like this:
http://www.matisse.net/seminars.html (or)
telnet.//well.sf.ca.us (or)
news:new.newusers.questions (etc.).
The most common way to use a URL is to enter into a WWW browser program, such as Netscape, or Lynx.
Usenet
A world-wide system of discussion groups, with comments passed among hundreds of thousands of machines. Not all Usernet machines are on the Internet, maybe half. Usenet is completely decentralized with over 10,000 discussion areas, called newsgroups.
WAIS
(Wide Area Information Servers) A commercial software package that allows the indexing of huge quantities of information, and then making those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet. A prominent feature of WAIS is that the search results are ranked according to how relevant the "hits" are, and that subsequent searches can find "more stuff like that last batch" and thus refine the search process.
WWW (World Wide Web)
Two meanings First, loosely used: The whole constellation of resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, Telnet, Usenet, WAIS and some other tools. Second, the universe of Hypertext servers (HTTP servers) which are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files etc. to be mixed together.
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