"Getting Wired Into the Internet: A Crash Course on FTP, Gopher, Web,and More" by J. Allard and Steven Sinofsky, MSJ, September 1994, is reprinted by permission of Microsoft Systems Journal, copyright © 1994, Miller Freeman, Inc. All rights reserved.
Disclaimer:This article should be viewed in a historical context. The Internet is evolving at a rapid pace and some of the information contained in this article, particularly the statistical information, was accurate only at the time of publication in 1994.
Web links:Microsoft Systems Journal: www.msj.com,Microsoft Interactive Developer: www.microsoft.com/mind
| The Internet is
many things to many people. For some, it's simply a
social gathering place; for others, it is a critical
resource for collaboration and communication, an
electronic mail backbone, or a rich source of
information. The most important aspect of the Internet is
that it allows more than 20 million people (a number
that's growing rapidly) to exchange ideas and information
in new and innovative ways. As more people connect and the technology advances, the Internet becomes more and more exciting. Five years ago the coolest applications were electronic mail and file transfer. Today's Internet is a whole new world with advanced information systems and incredible volumes of content. The next wave of applications may well be focused around real-time collaboration such as audio and video conferencing. If you are not already wired into the Internet, now's the time to get connected. Here we'll explore the structure of the Internet and then examine some of the more popular Internet services including ftp, Gopher, and World Wide Web. We'll also show you a sampling of the current set of applications and services available on the Internet for users of WindowsTM, and how those services are implemented. What Is the Internet? An internetwork is simply a collection of networks. The Internet refers to a specific collection of networks around the world linked together using the TCP/IP protocol suite. The Internet has become so ubiquitous that sometimes it is simply referred to as the Net. The Internet began in the late 1960s as a research project sponsored by the U.S. government through DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Today the Internet has grown to more than 2 million hosts (computers connected to Internet) in over 130 countries. In addition to the DARPANET, the U.S. portion of the Internet includes Milnet, NASA Science Internet (NSI), and the largest of these networks, NSFNet. As recently as the late 1980s the Internet was considered by many as something for computer geeks to entertain themselves with. Although the Net did provide a foundation for collaborative research among universities for many years, only recently has the Internet become a part of business and commerce, especially in high-tech industries. The Internet is quickly finding its way into the nation's secondary schools with programs such as the NSF-sponsored Global Schoolhouse, which is connecting high school students around the world with Internet technologies. One of the most useful aspects of the Internet is that it's a great means for the dissemination of information about itself and software for using it. Since the Internet is so dynamic, much of what is written on it (including parts of this article) is out of date by the time it's printed. For this reason, we recommend that you refer to the referenced sources on the Internet for the latest specifications and data. We'll give you locations and resources where you can find more recent information with Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). URLs are discussed in more detail in the World Wide Web section. |
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