In the beginning

I have been writing articles for a local magazine about the Internet, what it is and what is does for people. They're republished here...

April 08 - In the beginning
The Internet is many things to many people. It helps people get access to information that was, until recently, unavailable or inaccessible; it enables them to shop without leaving their home and it allows them to communicate with people quicker and more frequently than ever before.

Over the coming months, we’ll take a closer look at how the Internet works and how you, as a business or individual, can get the most out of this 21st century tool.

We’ll start this month with a look at its creation and growth and de-mystify the more commonly used jargon.

Many inventors and scientists have claimed to have had a hand in the development of the Internet but its father is generally accepted as being Sir Tim Berners-Lee - a British scientist working in Switzerland at the time of his invention. He proposed the concept of hypertext, to facilitate the sharing and updating of information among researchers. Hypertext refers to text on a computer that will lead the user to other, related information. Berners-Lee published the first commercial website on  the 30th April 1991 and, I suspect, at that time he had little idea that in just over a decade there would be more than a billion people regularly accessing more than 100 billion web-pages, a figure that’s growing at more than 10million every day!

In simple terms, the Internet is a distributed network of computers that can talk to and share information with each other. Computers are connected through a telephone network that is predominantly cables or fibres in the ground but can also be wireless/satellite.

The World Wide Web, often referred to as ‘The Web’ is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources like pictures, music and movies linked by hyperlinks and URL’s. URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is a unique identifier for a particular document on the web. For example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL.

Search engines are information retrieval systems that allow people to find documents and resources on the web. The easiest way to visualise a search engine is to think of it as a traditional card index system where records are kept alphabetically.

Search engines are the most important aspect of the Internet when it comes to finding information. The best-known, and most frequently used, search engines are Google, Yahoo! and MSN and, in the English speaking world, these account for around 95% of the 700 million search request every day!

Hyperlinks and URL’s, together with search engines, form the basis of all that happens on the Internet today.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s brainwave proposals to help scientists has literally revolutionised the way we now run our lives and the way we do business.

The Internet has had a dramatic effect on businesses that have embraced the technology and, as individuals, the way in which we communicate and relate to others and the way that we organise our lives.

Some common terms..

Bandwidth - the rate that data (information) travels from one place to another either inside a computer or between computers through a communications circuit, usually expressed as bits per second (bps), kilobits (thousands of bits) per second (kbit/s), megabits (millions of bits) per second (Mbit/s).

Domain name - all computers accessing the Internet have a unique Internet Protocol number (IP), cross-referenced with a unique domain name usually followed by a domain suffix .com, .org or .co.uk (e.g. ‘myname.co.uk'). The domain name is a user-friendly way of referring to the IP number.

HTML - HyperText Markup Language - the most common computer mark-up language used to create web pages on the World Wide Web. Now a de-facto universal standard.

 

 

 


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