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INDEX :
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So, to access the World Wide Web, you need a software called WEB BROWSER. The 2 most popular are NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR (or COMMUNICATOR) and INTERNET EXPLORER. Remember always to get the latest so you will have a better view of the WWW.
When you first open your Web browser it will automatically load the homepage
(main web page) and it can be the browser’s manufacturer web page (default)
or a page of your choice. From the page that loads you can see the basic
elements of a Web Page. You have the text and the graphics, and some words
are in a different color. These words are hyperlinks to another Web Page;
if you click one of those words a new page will load. In some cases, clicking
on a link may begin a file download (file transfer), but no worries: you
can press the STOP button at any time. You may also find some graphics
hyperlinks (when your mouse cursor change to a pointed hand) which can
be clicked on o take you to a Web Page.What has been coined “surfing the
web” is linking from page to page. You can go on a endless adventure so
Welcome on line !
THE STORY OF THE NET
AND SOME TECHNICAL HINTS
For the last few years or so, every time you turn around, you hear something about the Internet or the World Wide Web. How long has it really been around? What’s it all about? Well it started in about 1968 when the government needed to link universities, military contractors and defense contractors together so that they could cooperate on advanced research projects together. The federal government formed an agency called Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). One of the key projects they were assigned to look at was if all of our defense information was stored in just one computer, it would be an easy target for a nuclear attack What was to be done about that threat? One way to survive that threat was to replicate and distribute the information between many computers all over the country using a network It’s like the old expression of not keeping all of your eggs in the same basket. If one basket falls, not all the eggs break.
In 1975, some of the languages, or protocols, that computers would use to talk to each other were agreed upon. Several major universities and defense contractors were linked together on a network called DARPANET all using the same protocol which now known as TCP/IP or Internet Protocol. This network has long since been dismantled and replaced by several networks that now span the globe. The largest one is run by MCI and IBM in a joint venture called Merit Networks, Inc. Sprint and AT&T also run large backbone networks. In the mid eighties, many more colleges and universities were connected to the Internet. This allowed the universities to share research information, programs and recent news. In the nineties, the Internet was opened up for commercial use as the cold war ended. Soon more and more ways of communicating information across this new "Information Super Highway" were being developed.
Now it
is possible to use the Internet to send letters electronically (e-mail)
across the globe or to your neighbor within minutes. You can look up information
about just about any topic you want to know about. The World Wide Web is
a collection of documents that spreads across 5 Million computers. You
can receive news from all over the globe, stock quotes, information about
what to do in a certain area, pictures of homes for sale, even the latest
gardening tips… Major libraries have their card catalogs, abstracts of
documents and sometimes even full text of books, magazines and other information
online. There are news groups where you can get information about one of
about 15,000 specialized subjects.
You can even make a voice call to your cousin on another
continent all for free once you have your computer hooked up to the Internet.
The first question comes from one of my neighbors who wishes to remain anonymous: What is all this WWW stuff with all the funny characters all about? The whole thing is called a Uniform Resource Locator or URL for short. For example here is the URL for my hiking page in Teller County: https://members.tripod.com/~thelastcall The http:// tells the computers what language you are going to speak in. Most web sites use http or HyperText Transfer Protocol, but there is also gopher, ftp, news and a few more. On many common web browsers this part can be ignored because they default to http://
The next part, members.tripod.com is the address of the computer that the document is on. Many of them start with www, but they don’t have to. In this case it starts with shell. The members is for Members of the TRIPOD community, a world wide community that gives 11Mb free for your web pages (see OUR WEB DESIGN). Rainbow is the name of just one of their computers. Many of the web addresses end in .com this is for commercial accounts. But there also is .edu for educational entities, .gov for government, .mil for military, .net for networks, .org for non-profit organizations and so on. For nets in foreign countries, the last couple of letters indicate which countries the site is in. Some of the more common ones are .au for Australia, .ca for Canada, .de for Deutschland or Germany, .jp for Japan.
The last part: /~thelastcall tells the computer at Tripod which file to go get. The funny squiggly character ‘~’ is called a tilde. This character is common to many personal pages. It is located on the left hand side of the keyboard next to the one (1) on your keyboard.
To go to a particular web page, on most web browsers like Netscape, Internet Explorer and Mosaic, you just type in the URL and hit return. A few seconds later, the page you wanted comes up on your computer. In another article, I will talk about what happens if you don't know the URL.
