Chapter 8: Fundamentals of the Internet

CHAPTER -8
FUNDAMENTALS OF THE INTERNET

1. Introduction
Internet or simply “the Net” is an international network connecting more than 140,000 smaller
networks in more than 170 countries. These networks are formed by educational, commercial, nonprofit,
government and military organization. On a given day 163 million computers in 200 countries get
connected to the Internet. Generally, the Internet is a network of networks.
2. What is Internet?
The term InterNet has been coined from two terms, Interconnection and Network.
A Network is simply a group of computers that are connected together for sharing information and
resources. Several such networks have been joined together across the globe to form what is called as the
Internet? Thus, Internet is nothing but a Network of networks.
There is no single, generally agreed- upon answer to the question because the Internet is different for each
of us:
• It is a set of computers talking over fiber optics, phone lines, satellite links, and other media.
• It is a place where you can talk to your friends and family around the world.
• It is a place to get cool game demos.
• It is an ocean of resources waiting to be mined.
• It is a place to do research for your thesis or a business presentation.
• It is unlimited commercial opportunity.
• It is a worldwide support group for any problem or need.
• It is a gold mine of professionals in all fields sharing information about their work.
• It is hundreds of libraries and archives that are open to your fingertips.
• It is the ultimate time-waster.
• It is the technology of the future that will help make our lives, and those of our children, brighter.
ü Although the Internet was originally meant for research purposes, it has now changed drastically
and is mainly used for commercial purposes.
ü Although there are organizations that help to manage different parts of the network, but there is no
single body that owns the Internet.
3. Who Owns the Internet?
No single entity owns the Internet. Any single person, service, corporation, university, or government
does not fund it. Every person who makes a connection, every group who’s Local Area Network (LAN)
becomes connected, owns a slice of the Internet. Because we have grown used to the model of centralized,
cooperative utilities, such as the phone companies and the electric companies, we can comfortably
compare the Internet to a utility.
The owner of the connected equipment therefore “owns” a piece of the Internet. The telephone companies
“own” the pieces that carry the packets (blocks of information). The service providers “own” the packet
routing equipment. So, while no one person or entity owns the Internet, all who use it or supply materials
for it play a part in its existence.

4. Internet Protocols
Protocols are the rules that the networks all use to understand each other. The various protocols are sets of
technical specifications that let computers exchange information, no matter what kind of computers they
are, or what kind of technology hooks them together. Ventures of software and hardware want their
products to be useful on the Internet, and so they make sure those products understand the Internet
protocols and operate with in them. The term interoperability has been coined to describe the ability of

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 Chapter 8: Fundamentals of the Internet

disparate type of hardware and software to work together under a common set of rules. Interoperability is
a hot market commodity today, and so you’ll see the term in the advertising and product reviews for all
kinds of computer products. These connected networks usually use the TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol) communications suite. TCP/IP and the various protocols that are used on the
Internet are important underlying concepts for the Net.

5. Applications of the Internet

As rightly mentioned earlier the Internet was originally meant for research purposes, and now it has
drastically changed for commercial purposes. Due to this drastical change the applications of Internet are
increasing day by day. Following are the few applications of Internet.
a) Accessing and obtaining Information.
The faster growing part of the Internet is the World Wide Web (WWW). The World Wide Web or simply
the Web consists of an interconnected system of sites called Websites. To access a website, web browser
software like Microsoft’s Internet Exp lorer or Netscape Navigator has to be used. It is very difficult to
conceive how much information is available on the web. Any information can be obtained from the web,
say for example, about travel agent, financial investment groups, restaurant guides, mail-order shopping
sites,……… etc. Online versions of newspapers and magazines are also available. How to search and
find such information?
By using Web search engines information of interest can be obtained. Search engines are nothing but
tools to search and find information from the web. These search engines are software called “Spiders” to
crawl around the Web for searching information. Examples of some popular search engines are
ü Altavista
ü Infoseek
ü Yahoo
ü Google
b) Communication
The World Wide Web is getting all the headlines, but for many people the main attraction of Internet is
the Electronic Main or E-Mail – the fastest way of sending messages from one user to another. It hardly
takes few fractions of a second to transfer a message. There are several websites offering this service.
For example,
• yahoo.com
• hotmail.com
• rediffmail.com
• freemail.com
• ethionet.et

c) Marketing and Business on the Web

Many people are now putting their business online. To do this, one needs to develop a website with
online order forms. This concept is developing very fast day by day. Of course, it costs money to make
more money.

6. Services of Internet
But what does one do with the Internet? May be four things, basically: mail, discussion groups, long-
distance comput ing, and file transfers. Internet mail is (e- mail or electronic mail), much faster as
compared to normal postal mail. One can also send software and certain forms of compressed digital
image as an attachment. News groups or discussion groups facilitate Internet user to join for various kinds

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 Chapter 8: Fundamentals of the Internet

of debate, discussion and new sharing. Long-distance computing was an original inspiration for
development of ARPANET and does still provide a very useful service on Internet. Programmers can
maintain accounts on distant, powerful computers, execute programs. File transfers service allows Internet
users to access remote machines and retrieve programs, data or text.
(a) E-Mail (Electronic Mail)
E- mail or Electronic mail is a paperless method of sending messages, notes or letters from one person to
another or even many people at the same time via the Internet. E- mail is very fast compared to the normal
post. E- mail messages usually take only few seconds to arrive at their destination. One can send messages
anytime of the day or night and it will get delivered immediately. You need not to wait for the post office
to open and you don’t have to get worried about holidays. It works 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
What’s more, the copy of the message you have sent will be available whenever you want to look at it -
even in the middle of the night. You have the privilege of sending something extra even such as a file,
graphics, images etc. along with your e- mail. The biggest advantage to using e- mail is that it is cheap,
especially when sending messages to other states or countries and at the same time it can be delivered to a
number of people around the world.Although e-mail is faster and cheaper, it has many of the components
of regular mail. It allows you to compose note, get the address of the recipient and send it. Once the mail
is received and read, it can be forwarded, replied. One can even store it for later use, or delete. In e- mail
even the sender can request for delivery receipt and read receipt from the recipient.
(i) Features of E-mail:

⇒ One-to-one or one-to- many communications

⇒ Instant communications
⇒ Physical presence of recipient is not required
⇒ Most inexpensive mail service, 24- hours a day and seven days a week
⇒ Encourages informal communication

(ii) Components of an E-mail Address : As in the case of normal mail system, e-mail is also
based upon the concept of a recipient address. The email address provides all of the information required
to get a message to the recipient from anywhere in the world. Consider the e-mail ID

[email protected]

In the example above, "john" is the local part, which is the name of a mailbox on the destination
computer, where finally the mail will be delivered. Hotmail is the mail server where the mailbox "john"
exists, .com is the type of organization on net, which is hosting the mail server.

There are six main categories:

⇒ com Commercial institutions or organization

⇒ edu Educational institutions
⇒ gov Government site
⇒ mil Military site
⇒ net Gateways and administrative hosts
⇒ org Private organizations

Examples of web sites that provide Email service include: www.yahoo.com, www.google.com,
www.ethionet.et, www.eudora.com

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(b)FTP (File Transfer Protocol):

File Transfer Protocol, is an Internet utility software used to upload and download files. It gives access
to directories or folders on remote computers and allows software, data and text files to be transferred
between different kinds of computers. FTP works on the basis of same principle as that of Client/Server.
FTP "Client" is a program running on the your computer that enables you to talk to, and get stuff from,
remote computers. The FTP client takes FTP commands and sends them as requests for information from
the remote computer or known as FTP servers. To access remote FTP server it is required but not
necessary to have an account in the FTP server. When the FTP client gets connected, FTP server asks for
the identification in-terms of User Login name and password of the FTP client. If one does not have an
account in the remote FTP server, still he can connect to the server using anonymous login.Using
anonymous login anyone can login in to a FTP server and can access public file archives, anywhere in the
world, without having an account. One can easily Login to the FTP site with the username anonymous and
e-mail address as password.

The basic objectives of FTP are

• to give flexibility and promote sharing of computer programs, files and data
• to transfer data reliably and more efficiently over network
• to encourage implicit or indirect use of remote computers using Internet
• to shield a user from variations in file storage systems among hosts.

The basic steps in an FTP session are:

• Start up your FTP client; by typing ftp on your system’s command line/’C>’ prompt (or, if you are
in a Windows, double-click on the FTP icon).
• Give the FTP client an address to connect to. This is the FTP server address to which the FTP
client will get connected
• Identify yourself to the FTP remote site by giving the Login Name
• Give the remote site a password
• Remote site will verify the Login Name/Password to allow the FTP client to access its files
• Look directory for files in FTP server
• Change Directories if required
• Set the transfer mode (optional);
• Get the file(s) you want; and
• Quit.

(d) WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW)

WWW is the acronym for the World Wide Web. It is also commonly kno wn as ‘The Web’. The WWW is
hypertext based information retrieval tool. One can easily surf the Web by jumping from one document to
another using the links in those documents. These documents can be in many formats, such as text,
graphics, animation, sound and latest is video. They may also be a combination of all these. All the
information on Internet are presented to the user as a document or more popularly known as Web Page.
All these Web Pages are link to each other or even to section within a Web Page. And these links are
known as Hyper Links. And the group of web pages which are interlinked is called web site.

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The tool used to view these Web Pages on Internet is known as Internet browser or simply browser. It is a
software program specifically developed to extract information on user request from the Internet and
present them as a Web Page to the viewer. There are several browsers available in the market. However
the most popular are Internet Explorer from Microsoft and Netscape from Netscape Inc. The process of
using browser to view information on Internet is known as Browsing or Surfing.

Figure 1 Example of a Web Page

7. Internet Address (web address)

Just like every house, every office, every location has an address, every page on the Internet has a unique
address. This address is used get the web page for user from Internet.

Just as the address of a house or office is known as its postal address, the address on the Internet is known
as URL (Uniform Resource Locator). A typical Internet address or URL would look like;

http://www.nos.org/computers/internet/url.htm

The URL locates a particular web Page, among all the computers connected to the Internet. The URL
contains the components that specify the protocol, server, and pathname of an item. Let us examine the
URL given above (http://www.nos.org/computers/internet/url.htm).

The protocol is followed by a colon (http:), the server is preceded by two slashes (//www.nos.org ), and
each segment of the pathname is preceded by a single slash (/computers/internet/url.htm). A protocol is
set of rules that tells the computer know how to interpret the information at that address.

The first component, the protocol, defines the manner for interpreting computer information. Many
Internet pages use HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). Other common Internet protocols that one
might come across are FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NEWS (Usenet news groups protocol), and
GOPHER (an alternative transfer protocol). Gopher protocol is mostly out of date now.

The second component, the server (www.nos.edu), identifies the computer system that stores the
information you seek and is always preceded by two slashes. A server is a computer that has information
stored on it and sends it to the client, when a request is made. Each server on the Internet has a unique
address name whose text refers to the organization maintaining the server.

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The last component (/computers/internet/), defines the path within the Server where the requested item
(url.htm) will be found. Most of the Web pages will have .htm or .html as their secondary or extension
name.

8. How to get connected to Internet

There are various type of connectivity to get hook on to Internet. They all can be broadly classified into
following category.

(i) Gateway Access: Gateway Access is also known as Level-One connection. It is the access to
the Internet from a network, which is not on the Internet. The gateway allows the two different types of
networks to "talk" to each other. But the users of the Gateway Internet have limited access to the Internet.
They might not be able to use all the tools available on Internet. The local Internet Service Provider (ISP)
normally defines this limitation.

(ii) Dial-up Connection: ‘Dial-up’ connection is also known as Level Two connection. This
provides connection to Internet through a dial- up terminal connection. The computer, which provides
Internet access is known as ‘Host’ and the computer that receives the access, is ‘Client’ or ‘Terminal’. The
client computer uses modem to access a "host" and acts as if it is a terminal directly connected to that host.
So this type of connection is also known as ‘Remote Modem Access’ connection. And the host to which
the client gets connected is actually connected to the Internet by a full time connection (See Leased
Connection).In dial- up connection to Internet, Host carries all the command that are typed on a client
machine and forward them to Internet. It also receives the data or information from the Internet on behalf
of the ‘Client’ and passes it to them. The client computer acts as a ‘dumb’ terminal connected to remote
host. This type of connection can further be divided into two categories.

To access any of these dial-up accounts you need the followings;

• Computer
• Modem
• Telephone Connection
• Shell or TCP/IP account from the ISP
• Internet client software such as Internet browser.

(iii) Leased Connection: Leased connection is also known as direct Internet access or Level Three
connection. It is the secure, dedicated and most expensive, level of Internet connection. With leased
connection, your computer is dedicatedly and directly connected to the Internet using high-speed
transmission lines. It is on-line twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Leased Internet connections
are limited to large corporations and universities who could afford the cost.

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