What Is The
Internet?
As more and more hype in the press comes out
about what you can do on the Internet, less and less are people
understanding what the Internet is. This isn't an entirely bad thing since
it indicates that less and less technical expertise is required to actually
use the Internet. But if you don't understand some simple concepts about
what the Internet is - and isn't - you won't be able to determine the
placement - or measure the value of the Internet - in regards to an overall
marketing strategy for your business or organization.
Simply
put, when you connect one office network of
computers - often called a Local Area Network (LAN) to another LAN or office
computer network, you can basically refer to the two networks as being
Inter-networked together. Hence the term Internet. Refining this a
little more, what makes the Internet such an amazing phenomenon is that the
Internet isn't comprised of just one or two networks of office computers
able to share data back and forth; the Internet is comprised of thousands
and thousands of networks of computers, with
each
network having any number of computers attached to it from 5 to 50,000.
Ok,
Many Computers Networked Together.
The
next question many people ask is "How is that going
to help me?" We say: Plenty!
Once the exclusive domain of military researchers and academicians, the
Internet has exploded in size - largely due to the emergence of tools like
the World Wide Web, a software protocol layer that allows easy access to
data available on the Internet. The growth of the Internet is averaging 20%
per quarter! And the newer users of computers attached to the Internet -
while still reflecting some traditional demographics - are less technology
centered but more consumer centered.
Companies
recognizing this already now place not only
marketing and public relations information on the Internet to promote
consumer awareness of their products, but are increasingly offering products
and services for sale directly to the consumer via the Internet. This
commercialization of the Internet is feeding on itself - as more people
flock to the Internet to find information about products, goods, services,
and traditional data for research purposes - more and more companies and
organizations are making this data available on the Internet.
Available
24 Hours A Day, Seven Days A Week.
The Internet is open for business around the clock. You can make text,
photos, graphics and charts, drawings, schedules, books, magazines and
catalogs, even audio and video clips available to millions of people using
the Internet day in and day out. Because the data is maintained on
computers, it's generally simple to update and keep the information current
- much more so than with print media. You don't have nearly the lead times
required to update information on the Internet as you do when going to
press; and publishing on the Internet is a fraction of the costs of print.
The
World Wide Web (commonly referred to as 'The
Web") is quite literally one of the most significant things to happen to
computers. The Web has been called the herald of the new information age. It
represents a totally new and expedient method of accessing information and
data intuitively and graphically from anywhere in the world. The Web is the
primary cause for the explosion in the Internet over the last two years.
Data
And Global Accessibility from the Internet
were once reserved for the technical elite. Web software not only makes
these resources available to a non-technical audience, but for the first
time in history, any business or organization can market consumer goods and
services on a scale once reserved for only the largest corporations; a
totally level playing field has emerged in advertising, and it's called the
World Wide Web!
To
Access And View Material On The Web, one
only needs a computer with a modem and software made especially for viewing
Internet resources graphically - commonly referred to as a web browser. Once
you get access to the Internet - available through a local Internet Service
Provider or from several commercial data services - you can use the browser
software to find information on just about anything, anywhere in the world.
The information is made available on the Internet by companies like CYBER
CITY ONLINE Internet Web Services who can convert brochures, catalogs,
magazines, and more into a format readily accessible by web browsers. Making
this data available to the net is called hosting, and is one of the
services offered by CYBER CITY ONLINE.
Surfing
The Web: One of the user-friendly
aspects of web browsers is that the software runs on virtually any computer
platform from Macs, to PCs, to Workstations. The other inherent feature of
using web browsers is that you select data or information you want to see or
read about by moving a mouse to a position on the screen indicated by what's
called a hyperlink, - typically some text that is a different color
and is underlined - and clicking. The hyperlink may be pointing to data
available locally on the same computer you're on, or data located on the
other side of the earth. It's basically transparent to you, and the data is
generally returned so fast that you don't have much time to think about it.
You may now see a number of hyperlinks on the "page" of new information you
just retrieved and click one of them - and end up looking at information
located somewhere else in the world. This hyper linking through various
information & eventually not quite being sure where you are physically is
what's referred to as "Surfing The Web". It also illustrates the
magic of the Internet; all information that's been made available to the
Internet is available everywhere on the net as a virtual
(not physical) file cabinet. The physical location of the computers making
the data available is transparent to the end user: the net becomes the
resource.
Ready
To Have Millions See Information About Your Company's Products Or Services?
CYBER CITY ONLINE
provides all the support you need to get your messages seen and heard loud
and clear all over town, or all over the globe. We have designed Web
interfaces to reservation systems, chat areas, on-line focus groups, and
have helped many companies sell their products directly through the Internet
via on-line catalogs. We've put up magazines, brochures, audio clips, and
much more. And we have references that will validate our record of success
that we'll be happy to share with you. All it takes to get in front of
millions of people is Contact
CYBER CITY
ONLINE.
Internet:
Connecting one Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide
Area Network (WAN) to another Internet works
the two, hence the origin of the work Internet. The Internet
today is a vast global collection of networks that can share communications
between any computing system on one of these networks with any other system
on any other equally connected network.
Simply think of your internal office LAN
connected through a network cable to another office LAN across the street.
The use of TCP/IP protocols by network members standardizes the
communications ability of all these systems to "talk" with each other.
Collectively this would describe an Internet in a very simple form.
Intranets vs. Private
Networks:
The term "Intranet" refers
to sharing internal corporate data and information resources among other
computer systems and their users in the same enterprise via the Internet.
The historical alternative would be buying a series of leased data lines
from the phone company that would connect each corporate network together
into what is termed a "private network". Private Networks
offer advantages in ownership and throughput, but are disadvantaged by the
price of lines and hardware and by having to provide additional maintenance
infrastructures. Since the Internet is a shared resource, many companies
prefer using it as a "virtual private network" (or VPN)
in place of a true private network to avoid overhead. In conjunction with
specialized security methods such as encryption or
firewalls, a VPN provides integrity and a robust environment at a
low cost. An "intranet" is such a use.
Access to the Internet:
Access to the Internet can be via a "dedicated"
(available 24x7) or "dial-up" (available as needed) line from
your computer or network to another network generally accessed via an
account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP
connects to other ISPs via a series of Internet "Backbones" that offer high
speed network connections between them. In many cases, ISPs may have other
businesses such as long distance phone services (like MCI). Serial Line
Internet Protocol/Point-to-Point Protocol (SLIP/PPP)
provide the handshaking agreements and temporary routing information when
dialing your personal computer into the Internet via an ISP.
TCP/IP:
Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
(TCP/IP) provides the Internet "envelope" that
carries data from one system to another system. Necessary address
information to route the data is also carried by TCP/IP.
Bridges and Gateways:
"Bridges" link LANs with one
another. "Gateways" are bridges that also translate data from
various network environments into each others protocol thus allowing data to
flow back and forth between the different nets.
Routers:
"Routers" help manage Internet
traffic by pointing data from place to place based on network addresses in
the TCP/IP data envelope. Think of routers as postal workers that forward
mail to the address on the envelope.
Commercial BBS Services:
America On-line and other Commercial BBS
Services provide proprietary data available only to subscribers.
Subscribers may reach these services by dialing into private networks run by
these services, or (in some cases) via the Internet. Dialing into a
commercial service does not necessarily confer Internet access to the user.
In many cases, Internet access is available as an add-on service, but may
have less performance than standard SLIP/PPP accounts through ISPs. This is
due to the overhead of the X.25 protocol used by many commercial services to
connect the computers you dial into locally to the corporate offices of the
service.
Internet Cloud:
The Internet is generally illustrated as a cloud
to represent the vast array of networks that are joined together world wide.
Systems and networks are always joining and leaving the Internet, but enough
networks are consistently available to route data between connected systems
just about anywhere in the world.
Domain Names and Addressing:
The "Domain Name System" (DNS) on
an Internet server translates an easy to remember name into an "IP
address". For example, the domain name CYBERCITY-ONLINE.NET
translates into the address Routers deliver mail, web, or other data
to the requested addresses based on the DNS translations. A typical E-Mail
address such as info@cybercity-online.net tells Internet
routers to first locate "CYBERCITY-ONLINE.NET", then the mail server routes
the mail to the user "info" at CYBERCITY-ONLINE.NET. E-Mail (and only
E-Mail) addresses use an "@" sign.
Bandwidth:
The speed of the connections between
computers on the Internet is referred to as their bandwidth. A 14.4 Kbps
modem transfers data half as fast as a 28.8 Kbps modem. (Kbps is shorthand
for kilo(1024) bits bits per second). ISDN allows speeds at
64 Kbps or 128 Kbps. A T1 or T3 connection
passes data at 1.54 Mbps and 45 Mbps respectively (where the "M" =
Mega, or 1024000 bits). Newer Fiber Optic lines being installed today
can pass data at 150 Mbps (an OC8 line), and at 600 Mbps (OC12),
and even higher. Cable TV modems can also offer speeds many times faster
than conventional computer modems, and while much cheaper than current
dedicated bandwidth options, roll-out of these units is being hampered by
poor performance of standard co-axial cable TV lines.
Internet Services:
Just like a phone line in your office can be used
alternately for a telephone handset, a FAX, and a computer MODEM depending
on what you need at any given moment, the Internet can be used for many
things over the same wire. Several popular software "protocols" - simple
handshaking agreements between like software - allow a user to send
E-Mail, use the World Wide Web, transfer files,
or log in remotely (to name a few services available through
the Internet).
The Internet/Web Explosion:
The recent explosion of activity surrounding the
Internet (which has doubled in size every year since 1982) is largely due to
the World Wide Web software which had emerged by 1993. Not only can
traditional forms of information such as articles and whole books be
published on the web, but so can advertisements, product brochures, and
complete catalogs with full color photos. And, by accessing programs that
run off the server via sophisticated techniques using the Common
Gateway Interface (CGI), orders for goods and services can be
generated by a user in a web site. On-line reservation systems built into a
web environment also offer a convenience that traditional media hasn't
duplicated.
The World Wide Web:
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
allows a software program on your PC, MAC, or UNIX Workstation referred to
as a web browser to seek out and retrieve information stored
on a web server on the Internet. Netscape's
Navigator
and
Microsoft's Internet Explorer are popular PC-based "web
browsers". The address of the web site -
a collection of graphics and text formatted into web pages -
is called a Uniform Resource Locator (or
URL for short). A URL looks like this:
http://WWW.CYBERCITY-ONLINE.NET
"Pointing the browser" to
this address (entering the address in the URL field) makes an Internet
connection between the browser and web server. Hypertext Links
similar to underlined phrases in windows-based help files allow the user to jump
from one set of information to another - either in the same web site, or on a
web server around the world - transparently. Hence the phrase "Surfing The
Web".
Web pages are created using Hypertext Markup
Language
(HTML) and need only to be made available to the Internet by a web
server to get world-wide visibility. Since web browsers are available for
virtually any computer platform, the need to recapitalize for added
computer hardware to take advantage of the features of the web has completely
disappeared. CGI gateways work with HTML to pass data out of and back to web
pages. Web pages are written in combinations of Perl, C/C++, Java, SQL and other
languages, many highly efficient web sites are created dynamically from database
objects based on a set of rules met by the software at run-time.
Back Office Support:
Increasingly, companies have been using the web
to access so called back-office applications such as databases.
With secure user authentication techniques to limit the target audience, data
that was once locked in departmental data farms can now be securely accessed and
shared across all levels of the organization including "external" sales and
support personnel.
By the year 2000 there would be 300 b user of Internet
world wide. It would be another utility like a gas, electric, telephone etc. To
read more about
World Wide Web Development
More Readings...
Glossary of Web
Glossary of Web II