Bibliography:

Deitel, Harvey M. T. R. Nieto, Paul J. Deitel Internet and World Wide Web: How to Program
Prentice Hall, Copyright 2000

Kurose, James F. and Keith W. Ross, Computer Networking -- A Top-Down Approach Featuring the Internet, Addison-Wesley, Copyright 2000.� Online:� http://occ.awlonline.com/bookbind/pubbooks/kurose-ross1/index.html

Internetworking Technology Overview
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/cisintwk/index.htm
Internetworking Technology Overview publication and the Cisco Connection Training multimedia CD-ROM provided the foundation from which this compilation was derived.
Copyright 1989-2000 � Cisco Systems Inc.

Online Internet Tutorials

A Basic Guide to the Internet

August 2000

The Internet is a computer network made up of thousands of networks worldwide. No one knows exactly how many computers are connected to the Internet, although estimates are ongoing. It is certain, however, that these number in the millions and are increasing at a rapid rate.

No one is in charge of the Internet. There are organizations which develop technical aspects of this network, but no governing body is in control. The Internet backbone, through which Internet traffic flows, is owned by private companies.

All computers on the Internet communicate with one another using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol suite, abbreviated to TCP/IP. Computers on the Internet use a client/server architecture. This means that the remote server machine provides files and services to the user's local client machine. Software can be installed on a client computer to take advantage of the latest access technology.

An Internet user has access to a wide variety of services: electronic mail, file transfer, vast information resources, interest group membership, interactive collaboration, multimedia displays, real-time broadcasting, shopping opportunities, and much more.

The Internet consists primarily of a variety of access protocols. Many of these protocols feature programs that allow users to search for and retrieve material made available by the protocol.

Components Of The Internet

WORLD WIDE WEB

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as the Web or WWW) is a system of Internet servers that supports hypertext to access several Internet protocols on a single interface Almost every protocol type available on the Internet is accessible on the Web. This includes e-mail, FTP, Telnet, and Usenet News. In addition to these, the World Wide Web has its own protocol: HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. These protocols will be explained later in this handout.

The World Wide Web provides a single interface for accessing all these protocols. This creates a convenient and user-friendly environment. It is no longer necessary to be conversant in these protocols within separate, command-level environments. The Web gathers together these protocols into a single system. Because of this feature, and because of the Web's ability to work with multimedia and advanced programming languages, the World Wide Web is the fastest-growing component of the Internet.

The operation of the Web relies primarily on hypertext as its means of information retrieval. HyperText is a document containing words that connect to other documents. These words are called links and are selectable by the user. A single hypertext document can contain links to many documents. In the context of the Web, words or graphics may serve as links to other documents, images, video, and sound. Links may or may not follow a logical path, as each connection is programmed by the creator of the source document. Overall, the WWW contains a complex virtual web of connections among a vast number of documents, graphics, videos, and sounds.

Producing hypertext for the Web is accomplished by creating documents with a language called HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. With HTML, tags are placed within the text to accomplish document formatting, visual features such as font size, italics and bold, and the creation of hypertext links. Graphics may also be incorporated into an HTML document. HTML is an evolving language, with new tags being added as each upgrade of the language is developed and released. The World Wide Web Consortium, led by Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, coordinates the efforts of standardizing HTML.

The World Wide Web consists of files, called pages or home pages, containing links to documents and resources throughout the Internet. The University Libraries Home Page is located at http://www.albany.edu/library/.

The Web provides a vast array of experiences including multimedia presentations, real-time collaboration, interactive pages, radio and television broadcasts, and the automatic "push" of information to a client computer. Programming languages such as Java, JavaScript and Visual Basic are extending the capabilities of the Web. An increasing amount of information on the Web is served dynamically from content stored in databases. The Web is therefore not a fixed entity, but one that is in a constant state of flux.

For more complete information about the World Wide Web, see Understanding The World Wide Web.

E-MAIL

Electronic mail, or e-mail, allows computer users locally and worldwide to exchange messages. Each user of e-mail has a mailbox address to which messages are sent. Messages sent through e-mail can arrive within a matter of seconds.

A powerful aspect of e-mail is the option to send electronic files to a person's e-mail address. Non-ASCII files, known as binary files, may be attached to e-mail messages. These files are referred to as MIME attachments. MIME stands for Multimedia Internet Mail Extension, and was developed to help e-mail software handle a variety of file types. For example, a document created in Microsoft Word can be attached to an e-mail message and retrieved by the recipient with the appropriate e-mail program. Many e-mail programs, including Eudora, Netscape Messenger, and Microsoft Outlook Express, offer the ability to read files written in HTML, which is itself a MIME type.

TELNET

Telnet is a program that allows you to log into computers on the Internet and use online databases, library catalogs, chat services, and more. To Telnet to a computer, you must know its address. This can consist of words (locis.loc.gov) or numbers (140.147.254.3). Some services require you to connect to a specific port on the remote computer. In this case, type the port number after the Internet address. Example: telnet nri.reston.va.us 185.

Telnet is available on the World Wide Web. Probably the most common Web-based resources available through Telnet are library catalogs. A link to a Telnet resource may look like any other link, but it will launch a Telnet session to make the connection. A Telnet program must be installed on your local computer and configured to your Web browser in order to work.

FTP

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. This is both a program and the method used to transfer files between computers. Anonymous FTP is an option that allows users to transfer files from thousands of host computers on the Internet to their personal computer account. FTP sites contain books, articles, software, games, images, sounds, multimedia, course work, data sets, and more.

If your computer is directly connected to the Internet via an Ethernet cable, you can use one of several PC software programs, such as WS_FTP for Windows, to conduct a file transfer.

FTP transfers can be performed on the World Wide Web without the need for special software. In this case, the Web browser will suffice. Whenever you download software from a Web site to your local machine, you are using FTP. You can also retrieve FTP files via search engines such as FAST FTP Search, located at http://ftpsearch.lycos.com/. This option is easiest because you do not need to know FTP program commands.

E-MAIL DISCUSSION GROUPS

One of the benefits of the Internet is the opportunity it offers to people worldwide to communicate via e-mail. The Internet is home to a large community of individuals who carry out active discussions organized around topic-oriented forums distributed by e-mail. These are administered by software programs. Probably the most common program is the listserv.

A great variety of topics are covered by listservs, many of them academic in nature. When you subscribe to a listserv, messages from other subscribers are automatically sent to your electronic mailbox. You subscribe to a listserv by sending an e-mail message to a computer program called a listserver. Listservers are located on computer networks throughout the world. This program handles subscription information and distributes messages to and from subscribers. You must have a e-mail account to participate in a listserv discussion group. Visit Liszt at http://www.liszt.com/ to see an example of a site that offers a searchable collection of e-mail discussion groups.

Majordomo and Listproc are two other programs that administer e-mail discussion groups. The commands for subscribing to and managing your list memberships are similar to those of listserv.

USENET NEWS

Usenet News is a global electronic bulletin board system in which millions of computer users exchange information on a vast range of topics. The major difference between Usenet News and e-mail discussion groups is the fact that Usenet messages are stored on central computers, and users must connect to these computers to read the messages posted to these groups. This is distinct from e-mail distribution, in which messages arrive in the electronic mailboxes of each list member.

Usenet itself is a set of machines that exchanges messages, or articles, from Usenet discussion forums, called newsgroups. Usenet administrators control their own sites, and decide which (if any) newsgroups to sponsor and which remote newsgroups to allow into the system.

There are thousands of Usenet newsgroups in existence. While many are academic in nature, numerous newsgroups are organized around recreational topics. Much serious computer-related work takes place in Usenet discussions. A small number of e-mail discussion groups also exist as Usenet newsgroups.

The Usenet newsfeed can be read by a variety of newsreader software programs. Newsreader software gives you access to the newsgroup messages which are stored on a central computer at the University. For example, the Netscape Communicator suite comes with a newsreader program called Messenger. Newsreaders are also available as standalone products.

FAQ, RFC, FYI

FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions. These are periodic postings to Usenet newsgroups that contain a wealth of information related to the topic of the newsgroup. Many FAQs are quite extensive. FAQs are available by subscribing to individual Usenet newsgroups. A Web-based collection of FAQ resources has been collected by The Internet FAQ Consortium and is available at http://www.faqs.org/.

RFC stands for Request for Comments. These are documents created by and distributed to the Internet community to help define the nuts and bolts of the Internet. They contain both technical specifications and general information.

FYI stands for For Your Information. These notes are a subset of RFCs and contain information of interest to new Internet users.

Links to indexes of all three of these information resources are available on the University Libraries Home Page at http://www.albany.edu/library/internet/net_info/faqs.html.

Chat & Instant Messenging

Chat programs allow users on the Internet to communicate with each other by typing in real time. They are sometimes included as a feature of a Web site, where users can log into the "chat room" to exchange comments and information about the topics addressed on the site. Chat may take other, more wide-ranging forms. For example, America Online is well known for sponsoring a number of topical chat rooms.

A variation of chat is the phenomenon of instant messenging. With instant messenging, a user on the Web can contact another user currently logged in and type a conversation. Most famous is America Online's Instant Messenger. ICQ is another commonly-used chat program.

Other types of real-time communication are addressed in the tutorial Understanding the World Wide Web.

Understanding the World Wide Web

August 2000

The World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers that supports hypertext to access several Internet protocols on a single interface. The World Wide Web is often abbreviated as the Web, WWW, or W3.

The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee of the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN) in Switzerland. The initial purpose of the Web was to use networked hypertext to facilitate communication among its members, who were located in several countries. Word was soon spread beyond CERN, and a rapid growth in the number of both developers and users ensued. In addition to hypertext, the Web began to incorporate graphics, video, and sound. In recent years, the use of the Web has now reached global proportions.

Almost every protocol type available on the Internet is accessible on the Web. Internet protocols are sets of rules that allow for intermachine communication on the Internet. The following major protocols are accessible on the Web:

E-mail (Simple Mail Transport Protocol or SMTP)

Distributes electronic messages and files to one or more electronic mailboxes

Telnet (Telnet Protocol)

Facilitates login to a computer host to execute commands

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Transfers text or binary files between an FTP server and client

Usenet (Network News Transfer Protocol or NNTP)

Distributes Usenet news articles derived from topical discussions on newsgroups

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)

Transmits hyptertext over networks. This is the protocol of the WWW.

Many other protocols are available on the Web. To name just one example, the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) allows users to place a telephone call over the Web.

HYPERTEXT: THE MOTION OF THE WEB

Producing hypertext for the Web is accomplished by creating documents with a language called HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. With HTML, tags are placed within the text to accomplish document formatting, visual features such as font size, italics and bold, and the creation of hypertext links. Graphics may also be incorporated into an HTML document. HTML is an evolving language, with new tags being added as each upgrade of the language is developed and released. The World Wide Web Consortium, led by Tim Berners-Lee, coordinates the efforts of standardizing HTML.

PAGES ON THE WEB

The World Wide Web consists of files, called pages or Web pages, containing information and links to resources throughout the Internet.

Web pages can be created by user activity. For example, if you visit a Web search engine and enter keywords on the topic of your choice, a page will be created containing the results of your search. In fact, an increasing amount of information found on the Web today is served from databases, creating temporary Web pages "on the fly" in response to user queries.

Access to Web pages may be accomplished by:

1. Entering an Internet address and retrieving a page directly

2. Browsing through pages and selecting links to move from one page to another

3. Searching through subject directories linked to organized collections of Web pages

4. Entering a search statement at a search engine to retrieve pages on the topic of your choice

RETRIEVING DOCUMENTS ON THE WEB: THE URL

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The URL specifies the Internet address of a file stored on a host computer connected to the Internet. Every file on the Internet, no matter what its access protocol, has a unique URL. Web software programs use the URL to retrieve the file from the host computer and the directory in which it resides. This file is then displayed on the monitor connected to the user's local machine.

URLs are translated into numeric addresses using the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). The numeric address is actually the "real" URL. Since numeric strings are difficult for humans to use, alphneumeric addresses are employed by end users. Once the translation is made, the Web server can send the requested page to the user's Web browser.

Anatomy of a URL

This is the format of the URL:

protocol://host/path/filename

For example, this is a URL on the home page of the House Committee on Agriculture of the U.S. House of Representatives: http://www.house.gov/agriculture/schedule.htm

This URL is typical of addresses hosted in domains in the United States.
Structure of this URL:

1. Protocol: http

2. Host computer name: www

3. Second-level domain name: house

4. Top-level domain name: gov

5. Directory name: agrictulture

6. File name: schedule.htm

Note how much information about the content of the file is present in this well-constructed URL. <> Other examples:

telnet://library.albany.edu the University at Albany library text-based catalog

ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/picasso a file at an ftp site

Several top-level domains (TLDs) are common in the United States:

com	commercial enterprise
edu	educational institution
gov	U.S. government entity
mil	U.S. military entity
net	network access provder
org	usually nonprofit organizations

In addition, dozens of domain names have been assigned to identify and locate files stored on host computers in countries around the world. These are referred to as two-letter Internet country codes, and have been standardized by the International Standards Organization as ISO 3166. For example:

ch	Switzerland
de	Germany
jp	Japan
uk	United Kingdom

It had been proposed that new top-level domains be added to the existing domain names. The U.S. Government has formed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to work out these and other issues relating to domain names.

HOW TO ACCESS THE WORLD WIDE WEB: WEB BROWSERS

To access the World Wide Web, you must use a Web browser. A browser is a software program that allows users to access and navigate the World Wide Web. There are two types of browsers:

1. Graphical: Text, images, audio, and video are retrievable through a graphical software program such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. These browsers are available for both Windows-based and Macintosh computers. Navigation is accomplished by pointing and clicking with a mouse on highlighted words and graphics.

You can install a graphical browser such as Netscape Navigator in your Windows-based or Macintosh machine. Navigator is available for downloading on the Netscape Web site: http://home.netscape.com/. Microsoft's Internet Explorer is available from the Microsoft Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/. To use these programs to access the Web, you need an ethernet connection or a dialup connection known as a SLPP or PPP. The latter may be obtained from an Internet Service Provider. For more information, see How to Connect to the Internet.

2. Text: Lynx is a browser that provides access to the Web in text-only mode. Navigation is accomplished by highlighting emphasized words in the screen with the arrow up and down keys, and then pressing the forward arrow (or Enter) key to follow the link. This browser is available through your personal VAX or UNIX account on campus. For more information, see Guide to Using Lynx.

Extending the Browser: Plug-Ins

Software programs may be configured to a Web browser in order to enhance its capabilities. When the browser encounters a sound, image or video file, it hands off the data to other programs, called plug-ins, to run or display the file. Working in conjunction with plug-ins, browsers can offer a seamless multimedia experience. Many plug-ins are available for free.

File formats requiring plug-ins are known as MIME types. MIME stands for Multimedia Internet Mail Extension, and was originally developed to help e-mail software handle a variety of binary (non-ASCII) file attachments. The use of MIME has expanded to the Web. For example, the basic MIME type handled by Web browsers is text/html associated with the file extention .html.

A common plug-in utilized on the Web is the Adobe Acrobat Reader. The Acrobat Reader allows you to view documents created in Adobe's Portable Document Format. These documents are the MIME type application/pdf and are associated with the file extension .pdf. When the Acrobat Reader has been configured to your browser, the program will open and display the file requested when you click on a hyperlinked file name with the suffix .pdf. The latest versions of the Acrobat Reader allow for the viewing of documents within the browser window.

Web browsers are often standardized with a small suite of plug-ins, especially for playing multimedia content. Additional plug-ins may be obtained at the browser's Web site, at special download sites on the Web, or from the Web sites of the companies that created the programs. The number of available plug-ins is increasing rapidly.

Once a plug-in is configured to your browser, it will automatically launch when you choose to access a file type that it uses.

Beyond Plug-Ins: Active X

ActiveX is a technology developed by Microsoft which may make plug-ins less neccesary. ActiveX offers the opportunity to embed animated objects, data, and computer code on Web pages. A web browser supporting ActiveX can render most items encountered on a Web page. For example, Active X allows users to view three-dimensional VRML worlds in a Web browser without the use of a VRML plug-in. As another example of the power of ActiveX, this technology can allow you to view and edit PowerPoint presentations directly within your Web browser. ActiveX works best with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE WEB

Today's World Wide Web presents an ever-diversified experience of multimedia, programming languages, and real-time communication. There is no question that it is a challenge to keep up with the rapid pace of developments. The following presents a brief description of some of the more important trends to watch.

Multimedia

The Web has become a broadcast medium. It is possible to listen to audio and video over the Web, both pre-recorded and live. For example, you can visit the sites of various news organizations and view the same videos shown on the nightly television news. Several plug-ins are available for viewing these videos. For example, Apple's Quick Time Player downloads files with the .mov extension and displays these as "movies" in a small window on your computer screen. Quick Time files can be quite large, and it may take patience to wait for the entire movie to download into your computer before you can view it.

The problem of slow download times has been answered by a revolutionary development in multimedia capability: streaming media. In this case, audio or video files are played as they are downloading, or streaming, into your computer. Only a small wait, called buffering, is necessary before the file begins to play. The RealPlayer plug-in plays streaming audio and video files. Extensive files such as interviews, speeches and hearings work very well with the RealPlayer. The RealPlayer is also ideal for the broadcast of real-time events. These may include press conferences, live radio and television broadcasts, concerts, etc. The Windows Media Player is another streaming media player. Many sites offer the option to use one player or the other. A list of sites that make use of these programs is available on the page, Multimedia on the Web.

Shockwave presents another multimedia experience. Shockwave allows for the creation and implementation of an entire multimedia display combining graphics, animation and sound.

Sound files, including music, may also be heard on the Web. It is not uncommon to visit a Web page and hear background music. Sound files are also available for downloading independent of Web page visits. Sound files of many types are supported by the Web with the appropriate plug-ins. The MP3 file format, and the choice of supporting plug-ins, is the latest music trend to sweep the Web. The famous Napster site allows for the exchange of MP3 files.

Live cams are another aspect of the multimedia experience available on the Web. Live cams are video cameras that send their data in real time to a Web server. These cams may appear in all kinds of locations, both serious and whimsical: an office, on top of a building, a scenic locale, a special event, and so on.

Programming languages and functions

The use of existing and new programming languages have extended the capabilities of the We What follows is a basic guide to a group of the more common languages and functions in use on the Web today.

CGI, Active Server Pages: CGI (Common Gateway Interface) refers to a specification by which programs can communicate with a Web server. A CGI program, or script, is any program designed to accept and return data that conforms to the CGI specification. The program can be written in any programming language, including C, Perl, and Visual Basic Script. A common use for a CGI script is to process an interactive form on a Web page. For example, you might fill out a form ordering a book through Interlibrary Loan. The script processes your information and sends it to a designated e-mail address in the Interlibrary Loan department.

Another type of dynamically generated Web page is called Active Server Pages (ASP). Developed by Microsoft, ASPs are HTML pages that include scripting and create interactive Web server applications. The scripts run on the server, rather than on the Web browser, to generate the HTML pages sent to browsers. Visual Basic and JScript (a subset of JavaScript) are often used for the scripting. ASPs end in the file extension .asp.

Java/Java Applets: Java is probably the most famous of the programming languages of the Web. Java is an object-oriented programming language similar to C++. Developed by Sun Microsystems, the aim of Java is to create programs that will be platform independent. The Java motto is, "Write once, run anywhere." A perfect Java program should work equally well on a PC, Macintosh, Unix, and so on, without any additional programming. This goal has yet to be realized. Java can be used to write applications for both Web and non-Web use.

Web-based Java applications are usually in the form of Java applets. These are small Java programs called from an HTML page that can be downloaded from a Web server and run on a Java-compatible Web browser. A few examples include live newsfeeds, moving images with sound, calculators, charts and spreadsheets, and interactive visual displays. Java applets can tend to load slowly, but programming improvements should lead to a shortened loading time.

JavaScript/JScript: JavaScript is a programming language created by Netscape Communications. Small programs written in this language are embedded within an HTML page, or called externally from the page, to enhance the page's the functionality. Examples of JavaScript include moving tickers, drop-down menus, real-time calendars and clocks, and mouse-over interactions. JScript is a similar language developed by Microsoft and works with the company's Internet Explorer browser.

VRML: VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) allows for the creation of three-dimensional worlds. These may be linked from Web pages and displayed with a VRML viewer. Netscape Communicator comes with the Cosmo viewer for experiencing these three-dimensional worlds. One of the most interesting aspects of VRML is the option to "enter" the world and control your movements within the world.

XML: XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is a Web page creation language that enables designers to create their own customized tags to provide functionality not available with HTML. XML is a language of data structure and exchange, and allows developers to separate form from content. At present, this language is little used as Web browsers are only beginning to support it. In May 1999, however, the W3 Consortium announced that HTML 4.0 has been recast as an XML application called XHTML. This move will have a significant impact on the future of both XML and HTML.

Real-Time Communication

Text, audio and video communication can occur in real time on the Web. This capability allows people to conference and collaborate in real time. In general, the faster the Internet connection, the more successful the experience.

At its simplest, chat programs allow multiple users to type to each other in real time. Internet Relay Chat and America Online's Instant Messenger are prime examples of this type of program. The development of a messenging protocols is underway. Such a protocol would allow for the expansion of this capability throughout the Internet.

More enhanced real-time communication offers an audio and/or video component. CU-See Me is one of the most popular sotware programs of this type. Even more elaborate are programs that allow for true real-time collaboration. Microsoft's NetMeeting and Netscape's Conference (available with Communicator) are good examples of this.

Featured collaboration tools include:

� audio: conduct a telephone conversation on the Web

� video: view your audience

� file transfer: send files back and forth among participants

� chat: type in real time

� whiteboard: draw, mark up, and save images on a shared window or board

� document/application sharing: view and use a program on another's desktop machine

� collaborative Web browsing: visit Web pages together

Currently no standard exists that will work among all conferencing programs.

Push: Push refers to a technology that sends data to a program without the program's request. This is the opposite of the typical "pull" of the Web, in which the user clicks on a link to request a file from a server. With push, the data is sent automatically. Content is sent through a "channel." The early Web-based implementation of push was commercial. Push can also be used to deliver software upgrades to a desktop machine.

Glossary

Glossary of Internet Terms

Copyright � 1994-2000 by Matisse Enzer

Thanks to SF Interactive for hosting this site. Email filtered by Spamcop.

The URL of this document is: http://www.matisse.net/files/glossary.html which is where you can look for the latest, most complete version. Feel free to make links to that URL.

Permission is granted to use this glossary, with credit to Matisse Enzer, for non-commercial educational purposes, provided that the content is not altered including the retention of the copyright notice and this statement. You may make links to this Glossary without asking permission, just go ahead and make the link.

Any use by a commercial entity is "commercial use". The licensing fee for reproduction for commercial use is $500 or 25-cents/copy, whichever is more. The license fee to copy the Glossary to a commercial web site is $500/year. Again, links do not require licensing or permission.

For permission to use it in other ways or to suggest changes and additions, please contact me by e-mail.: matisse@matisse.net

Last update: 4 May, 2000

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

ADN

(Advanced Digital Network) -- Usually refers to a 56Kbps leased-line.

ADSL

See: DSL

Anonymous FTP

See: FTP

Applet

A small Java program that can be embedded in an HTML page. Applets differ from full-fledged Java applications in that they are not allowed to access certain resources on the local computer, such as files and serial devices (modems, printers, etc.), and are prohibited from communicating with most other computers across a network. The current rule is that an applet can only make an Internet connection to the computer from which the applet was sent.

See Also: Internet

ASCII

(American Standard Code for Information Interchange) -- This is the de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case Latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111.

Backbone

A high-speed line or series of connections that forms a major pathway within a network. The term is relative as a backbone in a small network will likely be much smaller than many non-backbone lines in a large network.

See Also: Internet

Java

Java is a network-oriented programming language invented by Sun Microsystems that is specifically designed for writing programs that can be safely downloaded to your computer through the Internet and immediately run without fear of viruses or other harm to your computer or files. Using small Java programs (called "Applets"), Web pages can include functions such as animations, calculators, and other fancy tricks.

We can expect to see a huge variety of features added to the Web using Java, since you can write a Java program to do almost anything a regular computer program can do, and then include that Java program in a Web page.

See Also: Internet

Netizen

Derived from the term citizen, referring to a citizen of the Internet, or someone who uses networked resources. The term connotes civic responsibility and participation.

See Also: Internet

Netscape

A WWW Browser and the name of a company. The Netscape (tm) browser was originally based on the Mosaic program developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Netscape has grown in features rapidly and is widely recognized as the best and most popular web browser. Netscape corporation also produces web server software.

Netscape provided major improvements in speed and interface over other browsers, and has also engendered debate by creating new elements for the HTML language used by Web pages -- but the Netscape extensions to HTML are not universally supported.

The main author of Netscape, Mark Andreessen, was hired away from the NCSA by Jim Clark, and they founded a company called Mosaic Communications and soon changed the name to Netscape Communications Corporation.

See Also: Browser , Mosaic , Server , WWW

Network

Any time you connect 2 or more computers together so that they can share resources, you have a computer network. Connect 2 or more networks together and you have an internet.

See Also: internet , Internet , Intranet

Newsgroup

The name for discussion groups on USENET.

Hobbes' Internet Timeline v5.2

Robert H'obbes' Zakon
Internet Evangelist
http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

Hobbes' Internet Timeline Copyright (c)1993-2000 by Robert H Zakon. Permission is granted for use of this document in whole or in part for non-commercial purposes as long as this Copyright notice and a link to this document, at the archive listed at the end, is included. A copy of the material the Timeline appears in is requested. For commercial uses, please contact the author first. Links to this document are welcome after e-mailing the author with the document URL where the link will appear. As the Timeline is frequently updated, copies to other locations on the Internet are not permitted.

The author wishes to acknowledge the Internet Society for hosting this document, and the many Net folks who have contributed suggestions and helped with the author's genealogy search. The author is now on a new search for a reference from an IEEE Senior or Fellow Member; if you are willing to serve as a reference, please email IEEE@Zakon.org (do not use this address for Timeline requests). Thank you!

1950s

1957

USSR launches Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, US forms the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the following year, within the Department of Defense (DoD) to establish US lead in science and technology applicable to the military (:amk:)

1960s

1961

Leonard Kleinrock, MIT: "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets" (May 31)

� First paper on packet-switching (PS) theory

1962

J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, MIT: "On-Line Man Computer Communication" (August)

� Galactic Network concept encompassing distributed social interactions

1964

Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks"

� Packet-switching networks; no single outage point

1965

ARPA sponsors study on "cooperative network of time-sharing computers"

� TX-2 at MIT Lincoln Lab and AN/FSQ-32 at System Development Corporation (Santa Monica, CA) are directly linked (without packet switches) via a dedicated 1200bps phone line; Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) computer at ARPA later added to form "The Experimental Network"

1966

Lawrence G. Roberts, MIT: "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers" (October)

� First ARPANET plan

1967

ARPANET design discussions held by Larry Roberts at ARPA IPTO PI meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan (April)

ACM Symposium on Operating Principles in Gatlinburg, Tennessee (October)

� First design paper on ARPANET published by Larry Roberts: "Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication

� First meeting of the three independent packet network teams (RAND, NPL, ARPA)

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies who coins the term packet. The NPL network, an experiment in packet-switching, used 768kbps lines

1968

PS-network presented to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)

Request for proposals for ARPANET sent out in August; responses received in September

University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) awarded Network Measurement Center contract in October

Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) awarded Packet Switch contract to build Interface Message Processors (IMPs)

US Senator Edward Kennedy sends a congratulatory telegram to BBN for its million-dollar ARPA contract to build the "Interfaith" Message Processor, and thanking them for their ecumenical efforts

Network Working Group (NWG), headed by Steve Crocker, loosely organized to develop host level protocols for communication over the ARPANET. (:vgc:)

Tymnet built as part of Tymshare service (:vgc:)

1969

ARPANET commissioned by DoD for research into networking

Nodes are stood up as BBN builds each IMP [Honeywell DDP-516 mini computer with 12K of memory]; AT&T provides 50kbps lines

Node 1: UCLA (30 August, hooked up 2 September)

� Function: Network Measurement Center

� System,OS: SDS SIGMA 7, SEX

� Diagram of the first host to IMP connection

Node 2: Stanford Research Institute (SRI) (1 October)

� Network Information Center (NIC)

� SDS940/Genie

� Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect"

Node 3: University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) (1 November)

� Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics

� IBM 360/75, OS/MVT

Node 4: University of Utah (December)

� Graphics

� DEC PDP-10, Tenex

Diagram of the 4-node ARPAnet

First Request for Comment (RFC): "Host Software" by Steve Crocker (7 April)

RFC 4: Network Timetable

First packets sent by Charley Kline at UCLA as he tried logging into SRI. The first attempt resulted in the system crashing as the letter G of LOGIN was entered. (October 29) [ Log entry ]

Univ of Michigan, Michigan State and Wayne State Univ establish X.25-based Merit network for students, faculty, alumni (:sw1:)

1970s

1970

First publication of the original ARPANET Host-Host protocol: C.S. Carr, S. Crocker, V.G. Cerf, "HOST-HOST Communication Protocol in the ARPA Network," in AFIPS Proceedings of SJCC (:vgc:)

First report on ARPANET at AFIPS: "Computer Network Development to Achieve Resource Sharing" (March)

ALOHAnet, the first packet radio network, developed by Norman Abramson, Univ of Hawaii, becomes operational (July) (:sk2:)

� connected to the ARPANET in 1972

ARPANET hosts start using Network Control Protocol (NCP), first host-to-host protocol

First cross-country link installed by AT&T between UCLA and BBN at 56kbps. This line is later replaced by another between BBN and RAND. A second line is added between MIT and Utah

1971

15 nodes (23 hosts): UCLA, SRI, UCSB, Univ of Utah, BBN, MIT, RAND, SDC, Harvard, Lincoln Lab, Stanford, UIU(C), CWRU, CMU, NASA/Ames

BBN starts building IMPs using the cheaper Honeywell 316. IMPs however are limited to 4 host connections, and so BBN develops a terminal IMP (TIP) that supports up to 64 terminals (September)

Ray Tomlinson of BBN invents email program to send messages across a distributed network. The original program was derived from two others: an intra-machine email program (SENDMSG) and an experimental file transfer program (CPYNET) (:amk:irh:)

1972

Ray Tomlinson (BBN) modifies email program for ARPANET where it becomes a quick hit. The @ sign was chosen from the punctuation keys on Tomlinson's Model 33 Teletype for its "at" meaning (March)

Larry Roberts writes first email management program (RD) to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages (July)

International Conference on Computer Communications (ICCC) at the Washington D.C. Hilton with demonstration of ARPANET between 40 machines and the Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) organized by Bob Kahn. (October)

First computer-to-computer chat takes place at UCLA, and is repeated during ICCC, as psychotic PARRY (at Stanford) discusses its problems with the Doctor (at BBN).

International Network Working Group (INWG) formed in October as a result of a meeting at ICCC identifying the need for a combined effort in advancing networking technologies. Vint Cerf appointed first Chair. By 1974, INWG became IFIP WG 6.1 (:vgc:)

Louis Pouzin leads the French effort to build its own ARPANET - CYCLADES

RFC 318: Telnet specification

1973

First international connections to the ARPANET: University College of London (England) via NORSAR (Norway)

Bob Metcalfe's Harvard PhD Thesis outlines idea for Ethernet. The concept was tested on Xerox PARC's Alto computers, and the first Ethernet network called the Alto Aloha System (May) (:amk:)

Bob Kahn poses Internet problem, starts internetting research program at ARPA. Vinton Cerf sketches gateway architecture in March on back of envelope in a San Francisco hotel lobby (:vgc:)

Cerf and Kahn present basic Internet ideas at INWG in September at Univ of Sussex, Brighton, UK (:vgc:)

RFC 454: File Transfer specification

Network Voice Protocol (NVP) specification (RFC 741) and implementation enabling conference calls over ARPAnet. (:bb1:)

SRI (NIC) begins publishing ARPANET News in March; number of ARPANET users estimated at 2,000

ARPA study shows email composing 75% of all ARPANET traffic

Christmas Day Lockup - Harvard IMP hardware problem leads it to broadcast zero-length hops to any ARPANET destination, causing all other IMPs to send their traffic to Harvard (25 December)

RFC 527: ARPAWOCKY

RFC 602: The Stockings Were Hung by the Chimney with Care

1974

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection" which specified in detail the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). [IEEE Trans Comm] (:amk:)

BBN opens Telenet, the first public packet data service (a commercial version of ARPANET) (:sk2:)

1975

Operational management of Internet transferred to DCA (now DISA)

First ARPANET mailing list, MsgGroup, is created by Steve Walker. Einar Stefferud soon took over as moderator as the list was not automated at first. A science fiction list, SF-Lovers, was to become the most popular unofficial list in the early days

John Vittal develops MSG, the first all-inclusive email program providing replying, forwarding, and filing capabilities.

Satellite links cross two oceans (to Hawaii and UK) as the first TCP tests are run over them by Stanford, BBN, and UCL

"Jargon File", by Raphael Finkel at SAIL, first released (:esr:)

Shockwave Rider by John Brunner (:pds:)

1976

Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom sends out an email on 26 March from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern

UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) developed at AT&T Bell Labs and distributed with UNIX one year later.

Multiprocessing Pluribus IMPs are deployed

1977

THEORYNET created by Larry Landweber at Univ of Wisconsin providing electronic mail to over 100 researchers in computer science (using a locally developed email system over TELENET)

RFC 733: Mail specification

Tymshare spins out Tymnet under pressure from TELENET. Both go on to develop X.25 protocol standard for virtual circuit style packet switching (:vgc:)

First demonstration of ARPANET/SF Bay Packet Radio Net/Atlantic SATNET operation of Internet protocols with BBN-supplied gateways in July (:vgc:)

1978

TCP split into TCP and IP (March)

RFC 748: TELNET RANDOMLY-LOSE Option

1979

Meeting between Univ of Wisconsin, DARPA, National Science Foundation (NSF), and computer scientists from many universities to establish a Computer Science Department research computer network (organized by Larry Landweber).

USENET established using UUCP between Duke and UNC by Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, and Steve Bellovin. All original groups were under net.* hierarchy.

First MUD, MUD1, by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw at U of Essex

ARPA establishes the Internet Configuration Control Board (ICCB)

Packet Radio Network (PRNET) experiment starts with DARPA funding. Most communications take place between mobile vans. ARPANET connection via SRI.

On April 12, Kevin MacKenzie emails the MsgGroup a suggestion of adding some emotion back into the dry text medium of email, such as -) for indicating a sentence was tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by many at the time, emoticons became widely used

1980s

1980

ARPANET grinds to a complete halt on 27 October because of an accidentally-propagated status-message virus

First C/30-based IMP at BBN

1981

BITNET, the "Because It's Time NETwork"

� Started as a cooperative network at the City University of New York, with the first connection to Yale (:feg:)

� Original acronym stood for 'There' instead of 'Time' in reference to the free NJE protocols provided with the IBM systems

� Provides electronic mail and listserv servers to distribute information, as well as file transfers

CSNET (Computer Science NETwork) built by a collaboration of computer scientists and Univ of Delaware, Purdue Univ, Univ of Wisconsin, RAND Corporation and BBN through seed money granted by NSF to provide networking services (especially email) to university scientists with no access to ARPANET. CSNET later becomes known as the Computer and Science Network. (:amk,lhl:)

C/30 IMPs predominate the network; first C/30 TIP at SAC

Minitel (Teletel) is deployed across France by France Telecom.

True Names by Vernor Vinge (:pds:)

RFC 801: NCP/TCP Transition Plan

1982

Norway leaves network to become an Internet connection via TCP/IP over SATNET; UCL does the same

DCA and ARPA establish the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. (:vgc:)

� This leads to one of the first definitions of an "internet" as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and "Internet" as connected TCP/IP internets.

� DoD declares TCP/IP suite to be standard for DoD (:vgc:)

EUnet (European UNIX Network) is created by EUUG to provide email and USENET services. (:glg:)

� original connections between the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and UK

Exterior Gateway Protocol (RFC 827) specification. EGP is used for gateways between networks.

1983

Name server developed at Univ of Wisconsin, no longer requiring users to know the exact path to other systems

Cutover from NCP to TCP/IP (1 January)

No more Honeywell or Pluribus IMPs; TIPs replaced by TACs (terminal access controller)

Stuttgart and Korea get connected

Movement Information Net (MINET) started early in the year in Europe, connected to Internet in Sept

CSNET / ARPANET gateway put in place

ARPANET split into ARPANET and MILNET; the latter became integrated with the Defense Data Network created the previous year. 68 of the 113 existing nodes went to MILNET

Desktop workstations come into being, many with Berkeley UNIX (4.2 BSD) which includes IP networking software (:mpc:)

Networking needs switch from having a single, large time sharing computer connected to the Internet at each site, to instead connecting entire local networks

Internet Activities Board (IAB) established, replacing ICCB

EARN (European Academic and Research Network) established. Very similar to the way BITNET works with a gateway funded by IBM

FidoNet developed by Tom Jennings

1984

Domain Name System (DNS) introduced

Number of hosts breaks 1,000

JUNET (Japan Unix Network) established using UUCP

JANET (Joint Academic Network) established in the UK using the Coloured Book protocols; previously SERCnet

Moderated newsgroups introduced on USENET (mod.*)

Neuromancer by William Gibson

Canada begins a one-year effort to network its universities. The NetNorth Network is connected to BITNET in Ithaca from Toronto (:kf1:)

Kremvax message announcing USSR connectivity to USENET

1985

Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link (WELL) started

Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC is given responsibility for DNS root management by DCA, and SRI for DNS NIC registrations

Symbolics.com is assigned on 15 March to become the first registered domain. Other firsts: cmu.edu, purdue.edu, rice.edu, ucla.edu (April); css.gov (June); mitre.org, .uk (July)

100 years to the day of the last spike being driven on the cross-Canada railroad, the last Canadian university is connected to NetNorth in a one year effort to have coast-to-coast connectivity. (:kf1:)

RFC 968: 'Twas the Night Before Start-up

1986

NSFNET created (backbone speed of 56Kbps)

� NSF establishes 5 super-computing centers to provide high-computing power for all (JVNC@Princeton, PSC@Pittsburgh, SDSC@UCSD, NCSA@UIUC, Theory Center@Cornell).

� This allows an explosion of connections, especially from universities.

NSF-funded SDSCNET, JVNCNET, SURANET, and NYSERNET operational (:sw1:)

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) comes into existence under the IAB. First IETF meeting held in January at Linkabit in San Diego

The first Freenet (Cleveland) comes on-line 16 July under the auspices of the Society for Public Access Computing (SoPAC). Later Freenet program management assumed by the National Public Telecomputing Network (NPTN) in 1989 (:sk2,rab:)

Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) designed to enhance Usenet news performance over TCP/IP.

Mail Exchanger (MX) records developed by Craig Partridge allow non-IP network hosts to have domain addresses.

The great USENET name change; moderated newsgroups changed in 1987.

BARRNET (Bay Area Regional Research Network) established using high speed links. Operational in 1987.

New England gets cut off from the Net as AT&T suffers a fiber optics cable break between Newark/NJ and White Plains/NY. Yes, all seven New England ARPANET trunk lines were in the one severed cable. Outage took place between 1:11 and 12:11 EST on 12 December

1987

NSF signs a cooperative agreement to manage the NSFNET backbone with Merit Network, Inc. (IBM and MCI involvement was through an agreement with Merit). Merit, IBM, and MCI later founded ANS.

UUNET is founded with Usenix funds to provide commercial UUCP and Usenet access. Originally an experiment by Rick Adams and Mike O'Dell

First TCP/IP Interoperability Conference (March), name changed in 1988 to INTEROP

Email link established between Germany and China using CSNET protocols, with the first message from China sent on 20 September. (:wz1:)

1000th RFC: "Request For Comments reference guide"

Number of hosts breaks 10,000

Number of BITNET hosts breaks 1,000

1988

2 November - Internet worm burrows through the Net, affecting ~6,000 of the 60,000 hosts on the Internet (:ph1:)

CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) formed by DARPA in response to the needs exhibited during the Morris worm incident. The worm is the only advisory issued this year.

DoD chooses to adopt OSI and sees use of TCP/IP as an interim. US Government OSI Profile (GOSIP) defines the set of protocols to be supported by Government purchased products (:gck:)

Los Nettos network created with no federal funding, instead supported by regional members (founding: Caltech, TIS, UCLA, USC, ISI).

NSFNET backbone upgraded to T1 (1.544Mbps)

CERFnet (California Education and Research Federation network) founded by Susan Estrada.

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) established in December with Jon Postel as its Director. Postel was also the RFC Editor and US Domain registrar for many years.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) developed by Jarkko Oikarinen (:zby:)

First Canadian regionals join NSFNET: ONet via Cornell, RISQ via Princeton, BCnet via Univ of Washington (:ec1:)

FidoNet gets connected to the Net, enabling the exchange of email and news (:tp1:)

The first multicast tunnel is established between Stanford and BBN in the Summer of 1988.

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Canada (CA), Denmark (DK), Finland (FI), France (FR), Iceland (IS), Norway (NO), Sweden (SE)

1989

Number of hosts breaks 100,000

RIPE (Reseaux IP Europeens) formed (by European service providers) to ensure the necessary administrative and technical coordination to allow the operation of the pan-European IP Network. (:glg:)

First relays between a commercial electronic mail carrier and the Internet: MCI Mail through the Corporation for the National Research Initiative (CNRI), and Compuserve through Ohio State Univ (:jg1,ph1:)

Corporation for Research and Education Networking (CREN) is formed by merging CSNET into BITNET (August)

AARNET - Australian Academic Research Network - set up by AVCC and CSIRO; introduced into service the following year (:gmc:)

First link between Australia and NSFNET via Hawaii on 23 June

Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll tells the real-life tale of a German cracker group who infiltrated numerous US facilities

UCLA sponsors the Act One symposium to celebrate ARPANET's 20th anniversary and its decomissioning (August)

RFC 1121: Act One - The Poems

RFC 1097: TELNET SUBLIMINAL-MESSAGE Option

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Australia (AU), Germany (DE), Israel (IL), Italy (IT), Japan (JP), Mexico (MX), Netherlands (NL), New Zealand (NZ), Puerto Rico (PR), United Kingdom (UK)

1990s

1990

ARPANET ceases to exist

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is founded by Mitch Kapor

Archie released by Peter Deutsch, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan at McGill

Hytelnet released by Peter Scott (Univ of Saskatchewan)

The World comes on-line (world.std.com), becoming the first commercial provider of Internet dial-up access

ISO Development Environment (ISODE) developed to provide an approach for OSI migration for the DoD. ISODE software allows OSI application to operate over TCP/IP (:gck:)

CA*net formed by 10 regional networks as national Canadian backbone with direct connection to NSFNET (:ec1:)

The first remotely operated machine to be hooked up to the Internet, the Internet Toaster by John Romkey, (controlled via SNMP) makes its debut at Interop. Pictures: Internode, Invisible

RFC 1149: A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers

RFC 1178: Choosing a Name for Your Computer

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Argentina (AR), Austria (AT), Belgium (BE), Brazil (BR), Chile (CL), Greece (GR), India (IN), Ireland (IE), Korea (KR), Spain (ES), Switzerland (CH)

1991

First connection takes place between Brazil, by Fapesp, and the Internet at 9600 baud.

Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) Association, Inc. formed by General Atomics (CERFnet), Performance Systems International, Inc. (PSInet), and UUNET Technologies, Inc. (AlterNet), after NSF lifts restrictions on the commercial use of the Net (March) (:glg:)

Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), invented by Brewster Kahle, released by Thinking Machines Corporation

Gopher released by Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill from the Univ of Minnesota

World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN; Tim Berners-Lee developer (:pb1:)

PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) released by Philip Zimmerman (:ad1:)

US High Performance Computing Act (Gore 1) establishes the National Research and Education Network (NREN)

NSFNET backbone upgraded to T3 (44.736Mbps)

NSFNET traffic passes 1 trillion bytes/month and 10 billion packets/month

Defense Data Network NIC contract awarded by DISA to Government Systems Inc. who takes over from SRI in May

Start of JANET IP Service (JIPS) which signalled the changeover from Coloured Book software to TCP/IP within the UK academic network. IP was initially 'tunneled' within X.25. (:gst:)

RFC 1216: Gigabit Network Economics and Paradigm Shifts

RFC 1217: Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR)

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Croatia (HR), Czech Republic (CZ), Hong Kong (HK), Hungary (HU), Poland (PL), Portugal (PT), Singapore (SG), South Africa (ZA), Taiwan (TW), Tunisia (TN)

1992

Internet Society (ISOC) is chartered (January)

IAB reconstituted as the Internet Architecture Board and becomes part of the Internet Society

Number of hosts breaks 1,000,000

First MBONE audio multicast (March) and video multicast (November)

RIPE Network Coordination Center (NCC) created in April to provide address registration and coordination services to the European Internet community (:dk1:)

Veronica, a gopherspace search tool, is released by Univ of Nevada

World Bank comes on-line

The term "surfing the Internet" is coined by Jean Armour Polly (:jap:)

Zen and the Art of the Internet is published by Brendan Kehoe (:jap:)

Internet Hunt started by Rick Gates

RFC 1300: Remembrances of Things Past

RFC 1313: Today's Programming for KRFC AM 1313 - Internet Talk Radio

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Antarctica (AQ), Cameroon (CM), Cyprus (CY), Ecuador (EC), Estonia (EE), Kuwait (KW), Latvia (LV), Luxembourg (LU), Malaysia (MY), Slovakia (SK), Slovenia (SI), Thailand (TH), Venezuela (VE)

1993

InterNIC created by NSF to provide specific Internet services: (:sc1:)

� directory and database services (AT&T)

� registration services (Network Solutions Inc.)

� information services (General Atomics/CERFnet)

US White House comes on-line (http://www.whitehouse.gov/):

� President Bill Clinton: president@whitehouse.gov

� Vice-President Al Gore: vice-president@whitehouse.gov

Worms of a new kind find their way around the Net - WWW Worms (W4), joined by Spiders, Wanderers, Crawlers, and Snakes ...

Internet Talk Radio begins broadcasting (:sk2:)

United Nations (UN) comes on-line (:vgc:)

US National Information Infrastructure Act

Businesses and media begin taking notice of the Internet

InterCon International KK (IIKK) provides Japan's first commercial Internet connection in September. TWICS, though an IIKK leased line, begins offering dial-up accounts the following month (:tb1:)

Mosaic takes the Internet by storm; WWW proliferates at a 341,634% annual growth rate of service traffic. Gopher's growth is 997%.

RFC 1437: The Extension of MIME Content-Types to a New Medium

RFC 1438: IETF Statements of Boredom (SOBs)

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Bulgaria (BG), Costa Rica (CR), Egypt (EG), Fiji (FJ), Ghana (GH), Guam (GU), Indonesia (ID), Kazakhstan (KZ), Kenya (KE), Liechtenstein (LI), Peru (PE), Romania (RO), Russian Federation (RU), Turkey (TR), Ukraine (UA), UAE (AE), US Virgin Islands (VI)

1994

ARPANET/Internet celebrates 25th anniversary

Communities begin to be wired up directly to the Internet (Lexington and Cambridge, Mass., USA)

US Senate and House provide information servers

Shopping malls arrive on the Internet

First cyberstation, RT-FM, broadcasts from Interop in Las Vegas

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) suggests that GOSIP should incorporate TCP/IP and drop the "OSI-only" requirement (:gck:)

Arizona law firm of Canter & Siegel "spams" the Internet with email advertising green card lottery services; Net citizens flame back

NSFNET traffic passes 10 trillion bytes/month

Yes, it's true - you can now order pizza from the Hut online

WWW edges out telnet to become 2nd most popular service on the Net (behind ftp-data) based on % of packets and bytes traffic distribution on NSFNET

Japanese Prime Minister on-line (http://www.kantei.go.jp/)

UK's HM Treasury on-line (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/)

New Zealand's Info Tech Prime Minister on-line (http://www.govt.nz/)

First Virtual, the first cyberbank, open up for business

Radio stations start rockin' (rebroadcasting) round the clock on the Net: WXYC at Univ of NC, KJHK at Univ of KS-Lawrence, KUGS at Western WA Univ

IPng recommended by IETF at its Toronto meeting (July) and approved by IESG in November. Later documented as RFC 1752

The first banner ads appear on hotwired.com in October. They were for Zima (a beverage) and AT&T

Trans-European Research and Education Network Association (TERENA) is formed by the merger of RARE and EARN, with representatives from 38 countries as well as CERN and ECMWF. TERENA's aim is to "promote and participate in the development of a high quality international information and telecommunications infrastructure for the benefit of research and education" (October)

After noticing that many network software vendors used domain.com in their documentation examples, Bill Woodcock and Jon Postel register the domain. Sure enough, after looking at the domain access logs, it was evident that many users were using the example domain in configuring their applications.

RFC 1605: SONET to Sonnet Translation

RFC 1606: A Historical Perspective On The Usage Of IP Version 9

RFC 1607: A VIEW FROM THE 21ST CENTURY

Countries connecting to NSFNET: Algeria (DZ), Armenia (AM), Bermuda (BM), Burkina Faso (BF), China (CN), Colombia (CO), Jamaica (JM), Jordan (JO), Lebanon (LB), Lithuania (LT), Macao (MO), Morocco (MA), New Caledonia (NC), Nicaragua (NI), Niger (NE), Panama (PA), Philippines (PH), Senegal (SN), Sri Lanka (LK), Swaziland (SZ), Uruguay (UY), Uzbekistan (UZ)

Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, uk, gov, de, ca, mil, au, org, net

1995

NSFNET reverts back to a research network. Main US backbone traffic now routed through interconnected network providers

The new NSFNET is born as NSF establishes the very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) linking super-computing centers: NCAR, NCSA, SDSC, CTC, PSC

Neda Rayaneh Institute (NRI), Iran's first commercial provider, comes online, connecting via satellite to Cadvision, a Canadian provider (:rm1:)

Hong Kong police disconnect all but 1 of the colony's Internet providers in search of a hacker. 10,000 people are left without Net access. (:api:)

Sun launches JAVA on May 23

RealAudio, an audio streaming technology, lets the Net hear in near real-time

Radio HK, the first commercial 24 hr., Internet-only radio station starts broadcasting

WWW surpasses ftp-data in March as the service with greatest traffic on NSFNet based on packet count, and in April based on byte count

Traditional online dial-up systems (Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy) begin to provide Internet access

Thousands in Minneapolis-St. Paul (USA) lose Net access after transients start a bonfire under a bridge at the Univ of MN causing fiber-optic cables to melt (30 July)

A number of Net related companies go public, with Netscape leading the pack with the 3rd largest ever NASDAQ IPO share value (9 August)

Registration of domain names is no longer free. Beginning 14 September, a $50 annual fee has been imposed, which up until now was subsidized by NSF. NSF continues to pay for .edu registration, and on an interim basis for .gov

The Vatican comes on-line (http://www.vatican.va/)

The Canadian Government comes on-line (http://canada.gc.ca/)

The first official Internet wiretap was successful in helping the Secret Service and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) apprehend three individuals who were illegally manufacturing and selling cell phone cloning equipment and electronic devices

Operation Home Front connects, for the first time, soldiers in the field with their families back home via the Internet.

Richard White becomes the first person to be declared a munition, under the USA's arms export control laws, because of an RSA file security encryption program tattooed on his arm (:wired496:)

RFC 1882: The 12-Days of Technology Before Christmas

Country domains registered: Ethiopia (ET), Cote d'Ivoire (CI), Cook Islands (CK) Cayman Islands (KY), Anguilla (AI), Gibraltar (GI), Vatican (VA), Kiribati (KI), Kyrgyzstan (KG), Madagascar (MG), Mauritius (MU), Micronesia (FM), Monaco (MC), Mongolia (MN), Nepal (NP), Nigeria (NG), Western Samoa (WS), San Marino (SM), Tanzania (TZ), Tonga (TO), Uganda (UG), Vanuatu (VU)

Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, gov, mil, org, de, uk, ca, au

Technologies of the Year: WWW, Search engines

Emerging Technologies: Mobile code (JAVA, JAVAscript), Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools

Hacks of the Year: The Spot (Jun 12), Hackers Movie Page (12 Aug)

1996

Internet phones catch the attention of US telecommunication companies who ask the US Congress to ban the technology (which has been around for years)

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, PLO Leader Yasser Arafat, and Phillipine President Fidel Ramos meet for ten minutes in an online interactive chat session on 17 January.

The controversial US Communications Decency Act (CDA) becomes law in the US in order to prohibit distribution of indecent materials over the Net. A few months later a three-judge panel imposes an injunction against its enforcement. Supreme Court unanimously rules most of it unconstitutional in 1997.

9,272 organizations find themselves unlisted after the InterNIC drops their name service as a result of not having paid their domain name fee

Various ISPs suffer extended service outages, bringing into question whether they will be able to handle the growing number of users. AOL (19 hours), Netcom (13 hours), AT&T WorldNet (28 hours - email only)

Domain name tv.com sold to CNET for US$15,000

New York's Public Access Networks Corp (PANIX) is shut down after repeated SYN attacks by a cracker using methods outlined in a hacker magazine (2600)

MCI upgrades Internet backbone adding ~13,000 ports, bringing the effective speed from 155Mbps to 622Mbps.

The Internet Ad Hoc Committee announces plans to add 7 new generic Top Level Domains (gTLD): .firm, .store, .web, .arts, .rec, .info, .nom. The IAHC plan also calls for a competing group of domain registrars worldwide.

A malicious cancelbot is released on USENET wiping out more than 25,000 messages

The WWW browser war, fought primarily between Netscape and Microsoft, has rushed in a new age in software development, whereby new releases are made quarterly with the help of Internet users eager to test upcoming (beta) versions.

RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths

Restrictions on Internet use around the world:

� China: requires users and ISPs to register with the police

� Germany: cuts off access to some newsgroups carried on Compuserve

� Saudi Arabia: confines Internet access to universities and hospitals

� Singapore: requires political and religious content providers to register with the state

� New Zealand: classifies computer disks as "publications" that can be censored and seized

� source: Human Rights Watch

Country domains registered: Qatar (QA), Central frican Republic (CF), Oman (OM), Norfolk Island (NF), Tuvalu (TV), French Polynesia (PF), Syria (SY), Aruba (AW), Cambodia (KH), French Guiana (GF), Eritrea (ER), Cape Verde (CV), Burundi (BI), Benin (BJ) Bosnia-Herzegovina (BA), Andorra (AD), Guadeloupe (GP), Guernsey (GG), Isle of Man (IM), Jersey (JE), Lao (LA), Maldives (MV), Marshall Islands (MH), Mauritania (MR), Northern Mariana Islands (MP), Rwanda (RW), Togo (TG), Yemen (YE), Zaire (ZR)

Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, uk, de, jp, us, mil, ca, au

Hacks of the Year: US Dept of Justice (17 Aug), CIA (19 Sep), Air Force (29 Dec), UK Labour Party (6 Dec), NASA DDCSOL - USAFE - US Air Force (30 Dec)

Technologies of the Year: Search engines, JAVA, Internet Phone

Emerging Technologies: Virtual environments (VRML), Collaborative tools, Internet appliance (Network Computer)

1997

2000th RFC: "Internet Official Protocol Standards"

71,618 mailing lists registered at Liszt, a mailing list directory

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is established to handle administration and registration of IP numbers to the geographical areas currently handled by Network Solutions (InterNIC), starting March 1998.

CA*net II launched in June to provide Canada's next generation Internet using ATM/SONET

In protest of the DNS monopoly, AlterNIC's owner, Eugene Kashpureff, hacks DNS so users going to www.internic.net end up at www.alternic.net

Domain name business.com sold for US$150,000

Early in the morning of 17 July, human error at Network Solutions causes the DNS table for .com and .net domains to become corrupted, making millions of systems unreachable.

Longest hostname registered with InterNIC: CHALLENGER.MED.SYNAPSE.UAH.UALBERTA.CA

101,803 Name Servers in whois database

RFC 2100: The Naming of Hosts

Country domains registered: Falkland Islands (FK), East Timor (TP), R of Congo (CG), Christmas Island (CX), Gambia (GM), Guinea-Bissau (GW), Haiti (HT), Iraq (IQ), Libya (LY), Malawi (MW), Martinique (MQ), Montserrat (MS), Myanmar (MM), French Reunion Island (RE), Seychelles (SC), Sierra Leone (SL), Somalia (SO), Sudan (SD), Tajikistan (TJ), Turkmenistan (TM), Turks and Caicos Islands (TC), British Virgin Islands (VG), Heard and McDonald Islands (HM), French Southern Territories (TF), British Indian Ocean Territory (IO), Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (SJ), St Pierre and Miquelon (PM), St Helena (SH), South Georgia/Sandwich Islands (GS), Sao Tome and Principe (ST), Ascension Island (AC), US Minor Outlying Islands (UM), Mayotte (YT), Wallis and Futuna Islands (WF), Tokelau Islands (TK), Chad Republic (TD), Afghanistan (AF), Cocos Island (CC), Bouvet Island (BV), Liberia (LR), American Samoa (AS), Niue (NU), Equatorial New Guinea (GQ), Bhutan (BT), Pitcairn Island (PN), Palau (PW), DR of Congo (CD)

Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, edu, net, jp, uk, de, us, au, ca, mil

Hacks of the Year: Indonesian Govt (19 Jan, 10 Feb, 24 Apr, 30 Jun, 22 Nov), NASA (5 Mar), UK Conservative Party (27 Apr), Spice Girls (14 Nov)

Technologies of the Year: Push, Multicasting

Emerging Technologies: Push, Streaming Media [:twc:]

1998

Hobbes' Internet Timeline is released as RFC 2235 & FYI 32

US Depart of Commerce (DoC) releases the Green Paper outlining its plan to privatize DNS on 30 January. This is followed up by a White Paper on June 5

La F�te de l'Internet, a country-wide Internet fest, is held in France 20-21 March

Web size estimates range between 275 (Digital) and 320 (NEC) million pages for 1Q

Companies flock to the Turkmenistan NIC in order to register their name under the .tm domain, the English abbreviation for trademark

Internet users get to be judges in a performance by 12 world champion ice skaters on 27 March, marking the first time a television sport show's outcome is determined by its viewers.

Network Solutions registers its 2 millionth domain on 4 May

Electronic postal stamps become a reality, with the US Postal Service allowing stamps to be purchased and downloaded for printing from the Web.

Canada kicks off CA*net 3, the first national optical internet

Compaq pays US$3.3million for altavista.com

CDA II and a ban on Net taxes are signed into US law (21 October)

ABCNews.com accidentally posts test US election returns one day early (2 November)

Indian ISP market is deregulated in November causing a rush for ISP operation licenses

US DoC enters into an agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Numbers (ICANN) to establish a process for transitioning DNS from US Government management to industry (25 November)

San Francisco sites without off-city mirrors go offline as the city blacks out on 8 December

Chinese government puts Lin Hai on trial for "inciting the overthrow of state power" for providing 30,000 email addresses to a US Internet magazine (December) [ He is later sentenced to two years in jail ]

French Internet users give up their access on 13 December to boycott France Telecom's local phone charges (which are in addition to the ISP charge)

Open source software comes of age

RFC 2321: RITA -- The Reliable Internetwork Troubleshooting Agent

RFC 2322: Management of IP numbers by peg-dhcp

RFC 2323: IETF Identification and Security Guidelines

RFC 2324: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)

Country domains registered: Nauru (NR), Comoros (KM)

Bandwidth Generators: Winter Olympics (Feb), World Cup (Jun-Jul), Starr Report (11 Sep), Glenn space launch

Top 10 Domains by Host #: com, net, edu, mil, jp, us, uk ,de, ca, au

Hacks of the Year: US Dept of Commerce (20 Feb), New York Times (13 Sep), China Society for Human Rights Studies (26 Oct), UNICEF (7 Jan)

Technologies of the Year: E-Commerce, E-Auctions, Portals

Emerging Technologies: E-Trade, XML, Intrusion Detection

1999

Internet access becomes available to the Saudi Arabian (.sa) public in January

vBNS sets up an OC48 link between CalREN South and North using Juniper M40 routers

First Internet Bank of Indiana, the first full-service bank available only on the Net, opens for business on 22 February

IBM becomes the first Corporate partner to be approved for Internet2 access

European Parliament proposes banning the caching of Web pages by ISPs

The Internet Fiesta kicks off in March across Europe, building on the success of La F�te de l'Internet held in 1998

US State Court rules that domain names are property that may be garnished

MCI/Worldcom, the vBNS provider for NSF, begins upgrading the US backbone to 2.5GBps

A forged Web page made to look like a Bloomberg financial news story raised shares of a small technology company by 31% on 7 April.

ICANN announces the five testbed registrars for the competitive Shared Registry System on 21 April: AOL, CORE, France Telecom/Ol�ane, Melbourne IT, Register.com. 29 additional post-testbed registrars are also selected on 21 April, followed by 8 on 25 May, 15 on 6 July, and so on for a total of 98 by year's end. The testbed, originally scheduled to last until 24 June, is extended until 10 September, and then 30 November. The first registrar to come online is Register.com on 7 June

First large-scale Cyberwar takes place simultaneously with the war in Serbia/Kosovo

Abilene, the Internet2 network, reaches across the Atlantic and connects to NORDUnet and SURFnet

The Web becomes the focal point of British politics as a list of MI6 agents is released on a UK Web site. Though forced to remove the list from the site, it was too late as the list had already been replicated across the Net. (15 May)

Activists Net-wide target the world's financial centers on 18 June, timed to coincide with the G8 Summit. Little actual impact is reported.

MCI/Worldcom launches vBNS+, a commercialized version of vBNS targeted at smaller educational and research institutions

Somalia gets its first ISP - Olympic Computer (Sep)

ISOC approves the formation of the Internet Societal Task Force (ISTF). Vint Cerf serves as first chair

Free computers are all the rage (as long as you sign a long term contract for Net service)

.ps is registered to Palestine (11 Oct)

vBNS reaches 101 connections

business.com is sold for US$7.5million (it was purchased in 1997 for US$150,000 (30 Nov)

RFC 2549: IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service

RFC 2550: Y10K and Beyond

RFC 2551: The Roman Standards Process -- Revision III

RFC 2555: 30 Years of RFCs

RFC 2626: The Internet and the Millennium Problem (Year 2000)

Top 10 TLDs by Host #: com, net, edu, jp, uk, mil, us, de, ca, au

Hacks of the Year: Star Wars (8 Jan), .tp (Jan), USIA (23 Jan), E-Bay (13 Mar), US Senate (27 May), NSI (2 Jul), Paraguay Gov't (20 Jul), AntiOnline (5 Aug), Microsoft (26 Oct), UK Railtrack (31 Dec)

Technologies of the Year: E-Trade, Online Banking, MP3

Emerging Technologies: Net-Cell Phones, Thin Computing, Embedded Computing

Viruses of the Year: Melissa (March), ExploreZip (June)

2000s

2000

The US timekeeper (USNO) and a few other time services around the world report the new year as 19100 on 1 Jan

A massive denial of service attack is launched against major web sites, including Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay in early February

Web size estimates by NEC-RI and Inktomi surpass 1 billion indexable pages

ICANN redelegates the .pn domain, returning it to the Pitcairn Island community (February)

Various domain name hijackings took place in late May and early June, including internet.com, bali.com, and web.net

A testbed allowing the registration of domain names in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean begins operation on 9 November. This testbed only allows the second-level domain to be non-English, still forcing use of .com, .net, .org. The Chinese government blocks internal registrations, stating that registrations in Chinese are its sovereignty right

ICANN selects new TLDs: .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name, .pro (16 Nov)
These domains will not be available until sometime in 2001 after contract negotiation and US Dept of Commerce approval

RFC 2795: The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite

Hacks of the Year: RSA Security (Feb), Apache (May), Western Union (Sep), Microsoft (Oct)

Technologies of the Year: ASP, Napster

Emerging Technologies: Wireless devices, IPv6

Viruses of the Year: Love Letter (May)

Lawsuits of the Year: Napster, DeCSS

Internet Server categories - ServerWatch
Server Platforms	NEW! Take a look at the engines that will be driving your servers
App Servers	Application Servers serve applications to users and are also used as traffic cops in database-intensive situations
Audio / Video	Deliver eye-catching streaming multimedia content over the Web
Chat Servers	Give your users the ability to participate in real-time text or audio-based discussions with a chat/community server
Fax Servers	NEW! Send and receive faxes with an Internet server. Great for keeping costs low and saving paper
FTP / Gopher	Serve files to customers with your own FTP site or create a gopher site for serving extremely large collections of information
Groupware	Give your users~regardless of where they're located~the power to work together in a virtual atmosphere
IRC Servers	Give your users the ability to participate in real-time text-based IRC discussions with an Internet Relay Chat server
List Servers	Create and serve your own mailing lists and e-mail response systems for your users, customers, or affiliates
Mail Servers	Set up a messaging system that allows your users to exchange e-mail over LANs and/or the Internet
News Servers	Create and serve your own intranet and/or Internet-based news and discussion groups
Proxy Servers	Keep your internal network safe while still allowing your users to access the Internet
Telnet / WAIS	Allow remote users to connect to a local computer and perform tasks as if they're actually working on the computer itself
Web Servers	Host your own Web site using one of these multiplatform servers

Small Office Networking Terms
Cable Access	Internet access is now offered by many cable television system operators. The most common Internet services offered in the United States are Time-Warner/MediaOne Roadrunner service and the @Home service offered by TCI, Cox, Comcast, and other cable systems. Other cable operators offer similar two-way cable services. Some cable operators offer a hybrid service that uses the cable for high speed downstream data transfer and a dial-up connection for a lower speed upstream path. Most cable access services are specifically designed for residential consumer use. While most do not explicitly deny service to businesses, there are typically severe terms of service restrictions which may effectively deny use of cable access for many small business networks. Each service contract must be carefully reviewed to determine the cable operator policy for the use of NAT, proxies, and servers of other kinds and to determine if certain protocols are filtered by the cable operator to deny these services to subscribers. While most cable access operates at 10 Mbps on the local cable segment, no cable operator makes any assurance that sustained throughput will match the 10 Mbps speed. Like a small office network, the cable segment bandwidth is apportioned to all subscribers who must then share that 10 Mbps bandwidth.
Dial-Up Access	Dial-Up Access provides temporary connectivity to the Internet via the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), also known as the analog phone system. The typical dial-up access service provides a temporary and changeable Internet address to the dial-up device, two or three domain name resolvers and one or more mailboxes.
Domain Name Registrar	A domain name registrar is a certified registrar or reseller that can arrange for the registration of your own unique domain name. The reseller/registrar may charge a fee for this service and the InterNIC registration service fee must also be paid.
Domain Name Resolver	A domain name resolver is used by network devices to resolve domain names to IP addresses. These resolvers are often called "servers" in device configurations. They are servers in the sense that they serve to resolve domain names on behalf of devices, but this terminology causes confusion with the domain zone servers which are the authoritative references for one or more parts of the domain name system.
Domain Name System	The domain name system is the system that allows devices to be referred to using a dotted name instead of a dotted decimal address. Names such as mail.domain.com and www.domain.com are representative of domain names. The domain name system requires zone servers to act as authoritative references for each domain name or zone and requires resolvers to allow devices to ask for resolution of a domain name to an Internet address, to discover SMTP mail exchangers for a domain, and to resolve several other types of domain records.
Domain Zone Server	An authoritative zone server serves as the sole reference for a specific .com domain name. For example, the top-level .com servers will refer requests to resolve names in domain.com to the domain.com zone server, which may further refer requests to sub-domain servers, serving hq.domain.com or sales.domain.com and so on. It is difficult to tell the difference between a domain zone and a domain name. For example, the zone *domain.com* may have a device with the domain name of "domain.com". The meaning is usually clear from the context.
DSL Access	DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Loop and is a new service offering from local telephone companies that fits between the multi-link ISDN service and the frame relay and T-1 dedicated digital circuit services. The key distinctions of DSL service are dedicated access and low price. The typical DSL service is faster than ISDN and because it is a dedicated circuit, the Internet is available full-time. DSL bandwidth can be asymmetrical or symmetric and ranges from 128 kbps to 1 Mbps, although the typical service is 384 to 512 kbps. DSL service costs a fraction of frame relay and T-1 costs. DSL service typically has none of the server restrictions of cable access and can be used for hosting web servers, email servers, and other services.
External Interface	The external interface of a router, NAT, or proxy gateway is the interface that is attached to the Internet or is closest to the Internet. The default-gateway for hosts on this subnet point to the Internet router, cable modem, or DSL modem and not to the gateway in question.
Forwarding and Routing	The process of moving an IP packet or datagram from one device to the next is called "forwarding". In order for devices to know the proper pathway for forwarding, they must speak a "routing protocol" to other forwarding devices or they must be manually configured with a complete routing table. Forwarding devices may or may not run routing processes. Any forwarding device may forward among the IP subnets to which it is directly attached without the need for additional routing table entries, provided that the forwarder has a proper IP address and subnet mask for each subnet to which it is attached. Forwarding devices that run routing protocols or that are manually configured with routing tables are called "routers". The term "gateway" is deprecated and is reserved for protocol translation and application proxies.
Frame Relay Access	Frame Relay is a type of virtual circuit data network. Frame Relay uses standard T-1 data circuits for access, but also uses statically-configured virtual circuits to connect the frame relay interface to one or more other frame relay interfaces. Frame Relay virtual circuits may have any bandwidth from 64 kbps up to 1536 kbps. Frame Relay service is not charged by the mile, but by the bandwidth of the permanent virtual circuits (PVCs). Frame Relay is sold separately from the Internet access service.
Gateway	A gateway is a device with two or more interfaces that supports some form of communication (forwarding, address translation, or proxy) between its directly connected subnets.
Internal Interface	The internal interface of a router, NAT, or proxy gateway is the interface that is further away from the Internet than the external interface. The default-gateway for hosts on this subnet point to the gateway in question.
Internet Access Provider	An Internet Access Provider is a vendor which provides access to the Internet and carries traffic to and from its customers and all other Access Service Providers. An Internet Access Provider must provide one or more registered IP addresses, typically from network blocks that are registered to the Access Provider. Access Providers also offer domain name resolvers for customer use. They may also provide one or more email post-office mailboxes and a variety of other Internet services.
Internet Presence	Your Internet Presence is the sum total of your domain name, your electronic mail addresses, and your web site address. If you carefully select your domain services, you can create an Internet presence that is indistinguishable from the most sophisticated Internet presence of the largest companies, without the accompanying expense and support costs.
InterNIC	The InterNIC is currently the only registrar certified to register .com, .net, and .org domain names. Top-level country domains are managed by an authority in each country. The .us domain is managed by ICANN. The .arpa domain is reserved for reverse address-to-name maps. In the near future, other registrars will be certified to offer .com, .net, and .org domains and new top-level generic domains will be created, giving domain seekers new choices for their top-level domain names.
Multi-Link Dial Access	Multi-link dial access is a variation of dial-up access that uses two or more ordinary dial-access modems to create one higher speed channel or connection to the Internet. The most common multi-link access device is the dual-channel ISDN dial access device. Other multi-link devices use two analog telephone connections to create one logical channel. It is important to note that the customer must have multi-link equipment which is compatible with the equipment and service offered by the Access Provider. Not all access providers support multi-link services and most charge extra for multi-link service. Multi-link service is not always available during periods when usage is heavy and dial access servers are full. The advantage of multi-link is that it allows for higher speed access without more expensive data circuits and equipment.
MX-SMTP Service	An SMTP server or mail exchanger (MX) will accept email via SMTP from any source on behalf of any email address in its supported domains. SMTP servers store the email in one or more post-office mailboxes or forward the email to another destination where it is stored in post-office mailboxes for pick-up. SMTP exchange service is usually offered in conjunction with SMTP relay service and a post-office service.
NAT	Network Address Translation is a special form of IP-forwarding where the Internet addresses in the IP header (and in certain protocol control messages) are substituted, or translated, from one interface to another. NAT allows private IP addresses to be used to connect to the Internet. While there are several forms of NAT, the only form referred to on this site is the many-to-one form where any number of private subnet addresses are translated to one (registered) address corresponding to the NAT interface which faces the Internet. Each private IP address and port pair are translated to the NAT IP address and a different port. From the outside of the private subnet, it appears that only one host with one IP address is communicating when in fact many hosts with many private IP addresses may be using ports on the NAT at any one time. NAT does not concern itself with UDP, TCP or any application protocols. NAT works only at the level of the Internet Protocol, the IP header which is part of every Internet packet.
Phone-Line Network	A simple and effective way to build a small network is to use the existing telephone wiring that is already in place for the telephones already in use. Phone-Line networks require no additional wiring. The computer is plugged into the phone jack and the telephone is plugged into the computer in daisy-chain fashion. The wires can support one telephone and about a dozen computers. Speeds range up to 1 Mbps. Phone-line networks do not require the use of hubs. Phone-line networked computers must all be plugged into the same phone line and the wiring may be daisy-chained, hub-and-spoke, or a combination.
Post-Office Service	A post-office (POP) service will receive domain mail from a source and hold it in one or more post-office mailboxes for pick-up by the address owner. Most post-office services will hold email for one email address in one domain in one post-office box (one-to-one service), but some domain mail services will accept and hold email to any mailbox in a specific domain in a domain mailbox (many-to-one services).
PPP-DSL	Point-to-Point DSL is a connection-on-demand type of service. While the DSL circuit is always connected, the virtual circuit from your premises to your access provider is only connected during times when you are sending traffic. Therefore, PPP-DSL acts like PPP dial-up access.
Private IP Addresses	A private IP address is one that is NOT part of the global Internet addressing system. Private addresses are used on small office networks to communicate only within that small network and to the Internet via Network Address Translation. Private addresses cannot be reached directly from the Internet, but may only be reached via a Network Address Translation forwarding device.
Proxy	A proxy is a stand-in or substitute. An Internet proxy is an application that proxies for a specific Internet application. As a simple example, an email proxy is a server that sends and receives email for a specific domain and holds or forwards the email to a private server. The proxy is a stand-in for the domain for everyone on the Internet. Proxies work in some respects like NAT. A proxy server requires only one registered IP address for however many proxy services it provides. From the point-of-view of IP-forwarding, a NAT and a proxy are interchangeable.
Registered IP Addresses	A registered IP address is one that is part of the global Internet addressing system. When you access the Internet, your access service provider must provide you with one or more registered IP addresses for you to communicate across the Internet. IP addresses are 32-bit binary numbers represented as dotted decimal numbers. Each of the four components of the dotted decimal address represents 8 bits or one octet of data. An octet ranges from zero to 255 decimal. IP addresses range from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255.
Router	A router is a device with two or more interfaces that forwards IP packets from one interface to another and maintains a table of routes collected from other routers using a routing protocol. A gateway that forwards IP packets from one interface to another using static routes is called an ip-forwarder.
SMTP-Relay Service	An SMTP server will generally NOT relay email bound for some destination that it does not directly serve. However, out-sourced email domains require a SMTP relay (also called a "smart host") in order to forward or relay email on behalf of mailboxes from the out-sourced domain. SMTP relay service is usually offered with SMTP service, but there are often restrictions on the access network if the service is provided by an access provider.
Subnet	Any device attached to the Internet must have an IP address and a definition of the local subnet to which it is attached. Because of the programming technique called "masking", the subnet definition is often given as a "subnet mask". This subnet mask defines that part of the IP address that refers to the subnet and the rest that corresponds to the host addresses that comprise that subnet. For example, if I have an interface attached to a network with the IP address of 192.168.1.10 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0, then my subnet addresses range from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.254 with the "all-zero" and "all-ones" addresses reserved to define the subnet and the broadcast address respectively. For this example, the host address is 192.168.1.10, the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0, the subnet is 192.168.1.0 and the IP-broadcast address is 192.168.1.255.
T-1 Access	T-1 circuits carry the equivalent of 23 voice channels with a symmetric speed of 1.536 Mbps. T-1 is dedicated full-time access to the Internet and is sold separately from Internet service. T-1 service may be fractional, or less than 1.536 Mbps and is usually charged by the circuit-mile. T-1 access has no restriction on the use of the network for any kind of web server, email server, or other Internet server.
URL Forwarding Service	URL forwarding service will forward HTTP requests for yourdomain web site to another URL. This allows you to have multiple domain names for the same site (e.g., www.yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.net) and allows you to use free web hosting services while referring to your web site using your own domain name. For example, a URL forwarding service would answer requests for www.yourdomain.com and forward them to www.yourwebhost.com/yourwebsite.
Web Hosting Services	A web site hosting service will provide disk space and network bandwidth on a shared server in exchange for a fee or advertising banner space. Most free web sites will not allow you to use your own domain name, but all fee-for-service web hosts will host your own web site (www.yourdomain.com) on a shared or dedicated web server.
Wired 10/100 Network	Wired networks support half-duplex and full-duplex 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps networks. Wired networks require wiring closets where wires terminate in a hub-and-spoke topology. Daisy-chained wiring cannot be used for 10/100 wired networking. Wires terminate in a wire center or closet on panels or punch-down blocks that are similar to telephone wiring systems. Active wall jacks are plugged into computers on one end and into a repeater hub or switch on the other end in the wiring closet. When the computer is moved and plugged into a new jack, the wiring closet jumper wires may need to be moved as well to activate the wall jack. The typical office has many wall jacks wired, but only as many activated as needed to save on hub ports. The main disadvantage to wired networks is the need to allocate space for the wiring closet and the cost of installing the wires, which is usually at the expense of the tenant. The main advantage is scale-ability and speed.
Wireless Network	Another simple and effective means of networking without new wiring is the wireless network. Wireless networks come in a variety of combinations of size, range, speed, complexity, and price. Most wireless networks are limited to about twelve to fifteen computers, but several wireless networks can operate independently in the same physical space, allowing wireless networks to grow to two or more overlapping segments.