THE INTERNET
The language of the Internet, constantly evolving, is sometimes hard to keep up with. What follows are some of these buzz words, defined in plain English. This is to explain in general terms what the Internet contains and is all about. It should be understood that the terms listed in the World Wide Web screen also apply to the Internet and were defined to allow us to communicate effectively with you in the development of your Web site.
Internet: A network of networks, connecting well over 50 million people, currently growing at a rate of 5 percent or more per month. The Internet is estimated to contain 30,000 different networks supporting at least 3½ million computers in 74 countries. As a decentralized network of networks, the Internet operates without any central agency or authority in charge. This is in sharp contrast to the commercial mass-market information services, which have centralized ownership and management (such as American On Line, Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi, Microsoft Network, and several others). When asked who is in charge of the Internet?, a common reply has been...the same people that are in charge of the national footpath and sidewalk system.
E-mail: Messages or other documents sent electronically over the Internet, with various capabilities to send copies to anyone and everyone, anywhere in the world.
Nodes: Are the organizations through which transmission of information is done through the Internet. The nodes on the network are identified by type and country. Types include commercial (.com), educational (.edu), government (.gov), organizations (.org), networks (.net), and many more--all these tacitly American. But as the Internet is now international, the suffix of an Internet address is also likely to indicate the country of origin, such as Australia (.au), Swiss (.ch), Israel (.il), Japan (.jp), Argentina (.ag), and many others.
TCP/IP: (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) are the primary technical protocols by which information is transmitted through the Internet, at lightning speed and effectively.
Archie: Is a database that serves as an index to the holdings of some of the major anonymous FTP sites. Without Archie, one can search for hours without finding desired title; with Archie, the search sometimes takes less than a minute. Archie searches a database of file names and it was the first widely deployed Internet index scheme.
Gopher: The Internet Gopher is named for the mascot of its home, the University of Minnesota. The name is also an apt metaphor, depicting a creature that burrows its way through the Internet, bringing useful things back to the user. Gopher, referred as a document delivery tool, can in fact deliver documents, lists of documents, and indexes. Gopher servers can offer not only textual information, but also organized "browsing lists" of resources on the Internet.
FTP: (File transfer protocol) provides the ability to exchange files of information, which is the way of being able to have access to multimedia information worldwide, instantaneously and at virtually no cost. Anonymous FTP is one of the oldest ways that information is offered on the Internet.
Telnet: Is the ability to use programs on computers anywhere on the Internet and has become the basis for networked publishing.
Veronica: A tool that can search across Gopher servers worldwide. Veronica periodically polls its target servers in order to build a database. A user connecting to Veronica specifies a keyword to search for example, the word "sobriety," and gets a list of document titles from throughout Gopherspace that include that string of characters. Veronica searches a list of document titles supporting a different set of search options than Archie, allowing Boolean searches of its title database.
WAIS: (Wide-Area Information Servers) Is a tool that allows an information provider to prepare indexes of digital piles of unstructured documents, while being a tool that lets users search these indexes with natural language questions. WAIS presents the user with a list of documents rank-ordered by how well they match the query.
Some of the buzz words in the World Wide Web,
which also define more specifically this most important area of the Internet:
Web Site: The entire contents of your Internet presence.
Home Page: The initial page (front door) of your Web site. This is usually the page that all other pages link to.
Web Page: Any page in your Web site, except the Home Page, that contains content information. Web pages are usually grouped based on the similarity or the complementarity of their content.
Hosting: Putting your Web page on AURA TECHNOLOGY's designated (the host) computer (server) so it can be readily accessed and viewed on the Web from any location in the world.
Search Engine: A computer database that registers Web pages based on certain keywords and enables users to find pages by topic or other supplied information.
Keywords: Words and phrases describing your business, that a search engine uses to catalog and locate your site.
HTML: (Hyper Text Markup Language) The programming language traditionally used to create Web Pages and thus place your information on the World Wide Web.
CGI-Scripts: Advance programs that increase the interactivity, abilities and interest value of a Web page.
URL: (Uniform Resource Locator) The address of your Web site, to which all searches and inquiries are directed.
http: (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) The start of every Web page address; the protocol that governs the transfer of information over the World Wide Web.