Chapter 10: The Internet

The Internet is a vast worldwide network of computers, which has grown and continues to grow at a fantastic rate, both in number of users and amount of traffic. You may not know that the Internet was originally designed to connect UNIX computers. Today it spans all types of operating systems. The major reason for its explosive growth has been the tremendous success of the World Wide Web (WWW), a vast collection of “pages” located on computers throughout the world that are connected over the Internet. The software that makes it possible to use the web effectively the web browser, has evolved into a powerful and easy-to-use application.

This chapter describes the Internet and introduces several different Internet services, including netnews (a bulletin board service), the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), Instant Messaging (IM), and the World Wide Web (WWW). We will concentrate on the most important of these services and provide enough information to help you get started using them. You will also get pointers on where to go to obtain detailed information about using Internet services, including many sources of information available on the Internet itself.

What Is the Internet?

The Internet is a network of computers that use common conventions for naming and addressing systems. It is a collection of interconnected independent networks; no one owns or runs the entire Internet. The computers that compose the Internet run variants of UNIX, as well as a variety of other operating systems, including Windows. Using the TCP/IP and related protocols, computers on the Internet can carry out a wide range of networking tasks. For example, people with Internet access can send electronic mail messages to other people on the Internet, as described in Chapter 8. People can log in to remote computers on the Internet using the telnet command as well as copy files on remote computers on the Internet using the ftp command (discussed in Chapter 9). And they can do many other things through web browsers, discussed later in this chapter.