Reading: The Internet Basics

Introduction

The Internet is probably the most exciting, the most popular,

most visible and definitely the “coolest” information systems
development of the decade.
What is the Internet?
The origins of the Internet can be found in the early sixties,
when the U.S. Department of Defense sponsored a project
to develop a telecommunications network that would survive
a nuclear attack. It had to link together a diverse set of
computers and work in a decentralized manner so that, if
any part of the network were not functioning, network traffic
would automatically be re-routed via other network nodes.
This project quickly grew into a popular academic network
linking virtually all major research institutions and U.S.
universities. Soon other countries jumped onto the
bandwagon, thus linking academics and researchers across
the globe. True to the academic ethos, it quickly became a
means for global information sharing. By now, businesses
also got a piece of the action. This was spurred on by the
trend to network the personal computers in home and
business environments and the development of more user-
friendly, graphical interfaces: the web-browser and the
Windows operating system.
The Internet (or, more colloquially, the Net) consists of a
huge and fast-growing number (hundreds of thousands) of
interconnected networks linked together. Currently more
than 100 million users are connected to the Internet. The
popularity of the Internet can be explained by the amount of
information it makes available: the equivalent of many
libraries of information is stored on millions of computers
(Internet hosts), much of it free of charge to all Internet
users. This information is provided by educational
institutions, governmental agencies and organizations,
individuals, and increasingly by businesses. Hence, the
Internet is frequently referred to as the Information Highway
or the Infobahn.
But the Internet is more than just a huge information
resource. Its initial purpose was to act as a communications
network and it fulfills that role well. It is the transport
mechanism for electronic mail, the transfer of computer files,
remote computer access and even allows for voice calls.
Businesses quickly realized the potential of the multimedia-
enabled Internet for marketing purposes. Of late, more and
more business transactions are being conducted via the
Internet: electronic commerce (e-commerce) is the latest
revolution to be embraced by the Internet community.
Electronic mail

Probably the most popular Internet service is electronic mail,

more commonly known as email. This consists of the
sending of messages composed on the computer, via a
network, directly to the computer of the recipient who reads
the message on his/her computer. Knowledge workers with
access to e-mail write five to ten times as many e-mail
messages as hand-written notes. The following are just
some of the advantages of e-mail.
• Reliability: although there is no guarantee, you will normally
receive quick feedback if the address does not exist or
there is a similar delivery problem.
• Efficiency: many short-cut tools exist to increase your
efficiency when composing messages. You can use
your computer’s cut-and-paste function, you can have
managed address books and lists, when replying to
another message you can automatically incorporate
any part of the message to which you are, etc. And it is
just as easy to send a message to one as to a whole list
of addressees. (Admittedly, this results in a lot of abuse
and information overload on the recipient’s side.)
• Digital: e-mail is composed on a computer and remains in
computer-readable format all the way to its destination.
Thus one can also easily incorporate other computer
data such as graphics or document files.
• Cheap: because the capacity of the Internet and disk
storage is increasing all the time, the cost of a sending
and storing a one-page e-mail message is negligible.
• Speed: messages are generally delivered across the world
in a matter of seconds.
The e-mail address
Just like with ordinary postal mail (now usually referred to as
snail-mail), you need to know the recipient’s address before
you can send your message. Internet e-mail addresses have
a standard format: username@domain. The username is
often the name that your addressee uses to connect to the
network, e.g. “jvanbelle” or sometimes a long number. This
username is allocated by the LAN administrator. The domain
identifies the file server, which acts as the local post office
for your recipient’s e-mail. The domain consists of several
parts, separated by full stops or dots. The international
standard for domain identification is ….
• The country code is the international two-letter code for the
country (e.g., au for Australia, za for South Africa, sa for
Saudi-Arabia, uk for Great Britain, etc).
• The two most common types of organizations are co for a
commercial organization and ac for an academic
institution . Less frequent are org for (not-for-profit)
organizations, mil for military, net for networks and gov
for government agencies.
• Each country has a national Internet naming body that
allows its organizations to chose their own name, as
long as no one has claimed the same name before.
Examples of South African domain names are
anc.org.za, uct.ac.za, fnb.co.za.
• Large organizations often refine the domain further by
adding the name of their LAN servers, e.g
mail.uct.ac.za.
Examples of possible e-mail addresses are:
[email protected] (Jane working in the statistics
department at the University of Cape Town in South Africa);
[email protected] (information department at the ANC, a
political party) or [email protected] (Joe Soap in
the marketing department of British Telekom in the U.K.).
The US Americans, having “invented” the Internet, use a
slightly different way for their addresses. They leave off their
country code (us) and use com for commercial organization
or edu for educational institution. Since the majority of
Internet users hail from the US, you will encounter many
addresses such as [email protected] or [email protected].
Netiquette
Just as in any other social interaction environment, there are
some rules and guidelines for appropriate social behavior on
the Net: Netiquette (etiquette on the Internet). The
following are some illustrative examples pertaining primarily
to e-mail.
• Shouting, THE PRACTICE OF TYPING ENTIRE
 SENTENCES IN UPPER CASE, is generally seen as
novice (newbie) behavior and frowned upon. Perhaps it
stems from the disgust with old teletypes and
mainframe terminals that did not have lower-case
characters.

• The use of emoticons to indicate the emotive content of a

sentence is highly recommended. Typed text does not
 reveal any body language and a joking remark can
easily be interpreted the wrong way. Whenever one
writes something in jest or with humorous intent, it is
advisable to add an emoticon. An emoticon (an icon
indicating emotional content) consists of a series of text
characters which are meant to be rotated a quarter turn
and represent a laughing :-) (i.e. equivalent to J or the
smiley) winking ;-) or sad face :-(
• Flaming is the carrying on of a heated personal emotional
debate between two or more individuals on a public
Internet forum. A flame war is generally a sign of
immature behavior by individuals who cannot take
perspective and should really take the discussion off-
line.
• Netizens (inhabitants of the Internet i.e. frequent net
surfers) often use standard but,
• to the non-initiated, cryptic abbreviations. Examples are:
BTW = by the way ; ROFL = rolling on the floor with
laughter ; TPTB = the powers that be; BRB = Be Right
Back. This vocabulary has been adopted and expanded
with the growth of Short Message Service (SMS) use
on cellular phones.
The Web
The Internet service that has received the most attention
from the public media is the WorldWide Web or the Web for
short (sometimes also called WWW or W3). The Web is a
vast collection of multimedia information located on Web
servers attached to the Internet.
Its popularity is due to a number of reasons.
• Information links are transparent. Links to any other piece
of information located anywhere on the Internet can be
inserted in a web document. A simple click of the
mouse takes the reader completely automatically from
one Web server to another, quite possibly in another
country.
• Information can be presented in a hypertext link format
whereby one can jump immediately from one concept
to a related concept or explanation. No need to read
text in the traditional top-to-bottom sequential way.
• It allows for multimedia information. A Web document can
incorporate rich and colourful graphics, animation,
video clips, sound etc. Just think of the marketing
opportunities!
• The Web supports interactive applications. Web
applications can request information from visiting users
and documents can include programming instructions.
Users can even download small programs (often written
in Java) that could perform some processing on the
user’s computer or display special visual effects.

Reading or accessing information on the Web is called

surfing the Net because one jumps from one hypertext link to
another following whatever takes your fancy. In order to surf
the Net you need some special browser program that
understands the Web protocols and formats and presents
the information to suit your computer monitor. You also need
an access point or connection to the Internet. Your Internet
connection may be automatic if your computer is connected
to a (corporate) LAN that connects directly to the Internet, or
it may be by means of a special subscription to a business
that specializes in providing Internet access for others: the
Internet Service Provider (ISP). Access to the ISP for
individual users is usually via a dial-up connection i.e. using
a modem and telephone.
Once a newbie (new user) is connected to the Internet
(online), she faces the daunting task of finding her way
amongst the huge variety of information offered. The easiest
way in is usually by means of a search engine: a Web site
that tries to catalogue the information available on the
Internet. By entering one or more search words, the engine
will provide you with a couple of adverts and a list of
documents that contain the word(s) for which you are
looking.
All information on the Web is uniquely identified by the URL
(Uniform Resource Location), which is really the full Internet
address of a Web document. The URL consists again of the
Web server’s domain address, followed by the access path
and file name on the server. Examples of URLs are
www.hotbot.com/sports/main.html (the main page on the
sports section of the HotBot search engine) or
http://www.commerce.uct.ac.za/informationsystems/
(containing details about UCT’s department of information
systems). Note the similarities and differences between an
URL and an e-mail address.
Other Internet services
A number of other services are available on the Internet. The
Usenet consists of ongoing discussion fora (or newsgroups)
on an extremely wide variety of topics, from forensic
psychology to Douglas Adams, from Star Trek to
cryptography. The discussion happens entirely by means of
e-mail and, when you subscribe to a given newsgroup, you
can browse through the contributions of the last few days
and reply with your own contribution.
More specialized services exist, such as ftp (file transfer
protocol) for the transfer of large computer files, and telnet,
the remote access of computers elsewhere, but they are
used less frequently. In any way, these services are now
being performed transparently by most Web browsers.
Similarly, older services such as Gopher and Veronica have
really been replaced almost entirely by the Web.
Internet protocols and standards
Different computers and networks can communicate via the
Internet because a number of basic Internet communication
standards have been defined. Any network connected to the
Internet will translate its own standards and protocols into
those used on the Internet by means of a bridge.
The most fundamental and “lowest level” protocol is the
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol).
This protocol is also the native protocol of computers using
the Unix operating system, which explains why Unix
computers are so popular as Internet servers.
On top of TCP/IP are the “mid-level” protocols defined for the
various Internet services. Perhaps the best known of these is
http (Hypertext Transmission Protocol), which specifies how
the Web information is made available and transmitted
across the Internet. Other protocols and standards are
STMP and MIME (for e-mail) or ftp.
 HTML
Information made available via the Web is usually formatted
using a special standard: the Hypertext Markup Language
(HTML), which actually consists of plain text files with visual
formatting commands inserted between the text. Most
desktop productivity software allows you to save your
document directly in the HTML format. Special HTML editors
allow much finer control over the final layout of your Web
document. A later development is Extensible Markup
Language (XML), which increases the flexibility of web
documents by allowing them to be viewed not only using a
web browser, but also on different platforms such as a PDA
or cellular telephone.