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<h3>What Is This Internet Thing Anyway?</h3>

<h4>How to Make your Internet:</h4>
<P>Here are your brief instructions on how to make one (<TT>1</TT>) internet and one (<TT>1</TT>) fortune (and how many of those are you likely to need?):</P>
<P><OL>
<LI>Take your multiple computers.</LI>
<LI>Connect them with 'phone lines (using a special black box called a modem).</LI>
<LI>Send data from machine to machine down the 'phone lines.</LI>
<LI>Sell to millions</LI>
</OL></P>
<P>As you might have gathered, however, it's a little more tricky than that.</P>


<h4>Some History:</h4>
<P>During the Cold War, the Americans wanted some sort of communications system to link all of their computers around their country, to transmit quickly critical data. To prevent the Russians taking out the entire system with a nuke, the system was <CITE>decentralised</CITE>: no one unit had control of the entire system. So, if you've ever wondered why they can't police the internet, that's why. This system was able to allow people on remote machines to type text to be sent to each other, allowing for what has come to be known as <CITE>internet relay chat</CITE>. Also, a system developed so that files could be submitted to an internet station, which could then be downloaded by other machines. These pools of data became known as <CITE>newsgroups</CITE>, as they were grouped by subject, with people joining those they wanted to read.</P>
<P>After this, universities started to join up and they made their own, unlicenced collection of newsgroups (for those of you who know about newsgroups, this is why most begin <CODE>alt</CODE>, standing for <CITE>alternate</CITE>, because they had to have a new code to become free of the tightly government-legislated newsgroups on their machines at the time).</P>
<P>However, as you can see right now, probably the key feature of the internet these days is the <CITE>world wide web</CITE>. This is basically a sort of address system, where you have one of these WWW addresses (called a <CITE>URL</CITE>), like, say <SAMP>www.doggysoft.co.uk</SAMP> or <SAMP>www.idsoftware.com</SAMP>, to indicate a particular part of the net. As at the beginning, the internet is still just a series of large computers, connected to each other across the world; these addresses allow you to specify which computer you want to look at. From there, you specify where (actually, what file in what directory) you want to load data from and up comes one of these nice web pages. These were invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist working at CERN, who wanted a method of exchanging scientific data between different groups in different countries, over this developing network of computers.</P>



<h4>The Lowdown of What You Can Do on the Internet:</h4>
<P><UL>
<LI><DL><DT>View web pages<DD>Just like you're doing now. They mostly have text and graphics, but some have sound and video, but they are, thankfully the minority. Why thankfully? Because sound and video generally require much more information to be sent to be completed, these will take longer to start up on your computer.<BR>The thing you view web pages in is called a <CITE>web browser</CITE>.<BR>The great thing about web pages is that if you click on one of these <a href="HTTutor">highlighted bits of text</a>, you can jump to another page somewhere else on the web! It adds another dimension to what would be an ordinary page of text. If you've clicked on it and come back, something may happen to the text, say, with the colour or the underlining. This is just to tell you that you've been that way before. Also, in the toolbar of the browser, there is probably a backwards facing arrow or a <SAMP>Back</SAMP> button. This takes you to the previous page you visited. There may also be a forwards buttion, for getting back after going back.</DL></LI>
<LI><DL><DT>Read newsgroups<DD>These are often known as (or contain) <CITE>discussion groups</CITE>, because each newsgroup is on a set topic. The idea is simple: you <CITE>post</CITE> messages to the newsgroup and people who connect to it can read them. Someone might post a request for help about a problem, which would generate a posted responce. Often, arguments rage on newsgroups and, when you get several articles about one article someone initially posted, it is called a <CITE>thread</CITE>.</DL></LI>
<LI><DL><DT>Download files<DD>A lot of free software is avaliable on the internet. Using something called the <CITE>file transfer protocol</CITE>, people can put archives of their software on the internet for you to copy off back to your own computer.</DL></LI>
<LI><DL><DT>Send and receive electronic-mail<DD>Electronic-mail, or <CITE>e-mail</CITE> for short, allows you to write messages on the computer and send them to other people on the internet. When they connect to the internet, they can download any waiting mail and read it.</DL></LI>
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