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INTRODUCTION
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The Internet
The Internet is a "network of networks" that link computers around the world. These
computers range from PC'S and Mac's to supercomputers, but they all use a set of rules
called TCP/IP to exchange information. Driven by the popularity of services like electronic
mail, file transfer, newsgroups, and the World Wide Web, the Internets growth rate has been
astonishing;
Originally funded by the Deparment of Defence and the National Science Foundation, the Internet
is now paid for and operated by the thousands of Institutions that use it. A commitee
known as the Internet Engineering Task Force defines technical standards. The Internet
is not controlled by a single administrative body; rather, it is an aggregation of schools,
corporations, goverment agencies, and other organizations that share resources and jointly fund the
regional "backbones" that interconnect their campuses.
The success of the Internet demonstrates how technology can produce unexpected social changes. The
engineers who created TCP/IP, Ethernet and other networking systems could not have anticipated the
creative uses that would be found for them. Once the exclusive domain of researchers and academics
, the Internet is now second only to the global telephone network in its scale, economic importance
and daily use.
The World Wide Web
A major reason for the accelerated growth of the Internet in the last few years is the World Wide Web,
a simple yet ingenius system that allows users to interact with documents stored on computers across the
the Internet as if they were parts of a single hypertext.
The web began in 1992 at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, as means of distributing
and annotating scientific research. Technical standards are now defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.
The creators of the web specified three sets of rules for creating, publishing and finding documents.
HTML, (Hypertext Markup Lanuage)
Web documents are ordinary text files that can be created with any word processing program. They include tags
that control their appearance. For example, the boldface above is achieved with these tags;
Tags
Tags can also define a word or phrase as a link. Selecting a link lets the user go to another document or to another
section of the same document. HTML documents often called pages can also include colour graphics, animations and
digitized audio or video. Users need a web browser program for example, Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer
to view web pages. |
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