What is Internet:
The father of the Internet was a project called ARPANET (ARPA=Advanced Research Project Agency), initiated by the US Department of Defense in 1969. The idea was to connect large defense contractors and universities doing military research.
In the early 1980Õs, universities began moving from single computer environments (usually large mainframes) to establishing distributed networks. And remember, the Internet is not a network; it is a network of networks.
Internet Tools:
E-Mail:
Electronic mail, or e-mail, is your personal connection to the world of the Net. It allows you to send and receive text messages, and files as well, to and from any user connected to the Internet anywhere in the world.
The basic concepts behind e-mail parallel those of regular mail. You send mail to people at their particular addresses. In turn, they write to you at your e-mail address. You can subscribe to the electronic equivalent of magazines and newspapers. You might even get electronic junk mail.
E-mail has two distinct advantages over regular mail. The most obvious is speed. Instead of several days, your message can reach the other side of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on where you drop off your mail and the state of the connections between there and your recipient). The other advantage is that once you master the basics, you'll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file libraries.
E-mail also has advantages over the telephone. You send your message when it's convenient for you. Your recipients respond at their convenience. No more telephone tag.
E-mail is your connection to help -- your Net lifeline. The Net can sometimes seem a frustrating place! No matter how hard you try, no matter where you look, you just might not be able to find the answer to whatever is causing you problems. But when you know how to use e-mail, help is often just a few keystrokes away: you can ask your system administrator or a friend for help in an e-mail message.
USENET Newsgroups:
Unlike e-mail, which is usually "one-to-one," Usenet is "many-to-many." Usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet their friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk about whatever's on their mind. To many people, Usenet IS the Net. In fact, it is often confused with Internet. But it is a totally separate system. All Internet sites CAN carry Usenet, but so do many non-Internet sites, from sophisticated Unix machines to old XT clones and Apple IIs.
Technically, Usenet messages are shipped around the world, from host system to host system, using one of several specific Net protocols. Your host system stores all of its Usenet messages in one place, which everybody with an account on the system can access. That way, no matter how many people actually read a given message, each host system has to store only one copy of it. Many host systems "talk" with several others regularly in case one or another of their links goes down for some reason. When two host systems connect, they basically compare notes on which Usenet messages they already have. Any that one is missing the other then transmits, and vice-versa. Because they are computers, they don't mind running through thousands, even millions, of these comparisons every day.
The basic building block of Usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called conferences, forums, boards or special-interest groups). There are now thousand of these newsgroups, in several different languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from science fiction to South Africa.
Newsgroup names start with one of a series of broad topic names. For example, newsgroups beginning with "comp." are about particular computer-related topics. These broad topics are followed by a series of more focused topics (so that comp.unix groups are limited to discussion about Unix).
The main hierarchies are:
bionet: Research biology bit.listserv: Conferences originating as Bitnet mailing lists biz: Business comp: Computers and related subjects misc: Discussions that don't fit anywhere else news: News about Usenet itself rec: Hobbies, games and recreation sci: Science other than research biology soc: "Social" groups, often ethnically related talk: Politics and related topics alt: Controversial or unusual topics; not carried by all sites
Usenet History: In the late 1970s, Unix developers came up with a new feature: a system to allow Unix computers to exchange data over phone lines. In 1979, two graduate students at Duke University in North Carolina, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, came up with the idea of using this system, known as UUCP (for Unix-to-Unix CoPy), to distribute information of interest to people in the Unix community. Along with Steve Bellovin, a graduate student at the University of North Carolina and Steve Daniel, they wrote conferencing software and linked together computers at Duke and UNC. Word quickly spread and by 1981, a graduate student at Berkeley, Mark Horton and a nearby high school student, Matt Glickman, had released a new version that added more features and was able to handle larger volumes of postings -- the original North Carolina program was meant for only a few articles in a newsgroup each day.
For information about new groups in usenet: Subscribe to: news.announce.newsgroups