The Internet is a world wide collection of separate physical networks, all interconnected, and using the Internet Protocol (IP) to link them all into a single logical network.
But what is it all for? What can you do with it? The simplest way to tackle these questions is to take a look at the main services available to anyone with a full Internet connection. They include:
Electronic mail (e-mail) is the way that one Internet user can communicate on a one-to-one basis with any other user.
The telnet program allows you to login to any machine on the Internet to which you have a user account and password.
As its name suggests, the file transfer protocol (ftp) program allows files to be transferred between machines.
Helps to find information about the kind of files archived at many ftp sites.
Imagine a world wide bulletin board with many thousands of special interest groups on virtually any topic you want...
This is another service which allows you to locate and retrieve documents. With its search program (called veronica), gopher is like a cross between archie and ftp, only more sophisticated. The gopher service is now largely being superseded by the world wide web.
Provides a framework within which hypertext documents can be created and viewed. The documents can contain hypertext links to other documents on any other world wide web (WWW) servers anywhere on the Internet.
In this chapter we'll take a brief look at each of these services to give you a head start when you get an Internet connection sorted out.