An Introduction to Internet © by Maurizio Bisogno 2003The Internet is
biggest revolution in communication and information era. Internet is millions of computers connected to each other via phone lines and also via satellite. The content of Internet consists of everything that is information-related and can be transmitted and stored as text, image, video and audio: i.e. in all electronic forms information can be stored. As I am writing more than 200 millions people are connected in this worldwide network, accessing all kind of information products.It also means that nearly in every corner of this planet there are computers connected or potentially connected to each other.
You need therefore a computer with modem and Internet Browser software to access this information world. When you have provided yourself with that you need to dial in an Internet Service Provider, which will allow you to access whole web through its servers.
The Internet Browser has several commercial names and appearances, like Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera and Monzilla. The windows that opens when you launch Internet Browser has at least a blank field in which you can enter web address of page you are looking for; at least a window to show you content of page and some basic buttons to go back and forward among pages, or scroll up and down on same page. Every Internet page has a unique address called URL, which stands for Unique Resource Locator. This is unique address of a web page; like your house, any page on Internet has a unique address, which appears like this: www.nameofthewebpage.com or .org, .us, .de, .org.
Imagine that you can chat with your pal in Australia, or China or Japan or California in real time at cost of a local call: this is one of numerous usages you can make of Internet. When your local is too small for you, you can get global – you can reach most remote computer on earth.
What said above is just to show you how powerful World Wide Web can be in making world smaller. Communication and Information are then two words that will certainly put you on right track when trying to understand what Internet is. Information and communication supported by computers and phone lines or satellites: this is what keeps Internet alive. But without you, Internet USER, all this wouldn’t have any sense.
As it allows you to communicate information, Internet is not only a place of ideas, but also a place of action. This means that you can do your shopping through Internet; you can actually buy anything you would in a normal shop down road. And of course, you could open your commercial web site where you could sell to world your special product. One of biggest mistakes is to believe that you can only sell information via web. That’s wrong. You put on your web site information that sells, and it would sell products which are non-information products, but 3D objects existing outside web page or services to be provided outside world wide web.
One of interesting usages you can make of Internet is banking. You can access your own bank account, view statement and even manage your funds, paying bills or receiving money.
The aim of this article is not to list all that you can do, but to give you a hint of what you can do over Internet. You are sitting at your computer in own room, or office, anywhere in world and it wouldn’t make a difference to you where information you are accessing is physically located.
In order to have an Internet Experience of a certain quality you need to take care of some technical factors together with some basic knowledge. In first place, speed is a key factor: how fast is your connection to your ISP? This is a crucial point. Generally speaking information travels in seconds from one corner of world to other; where you may experience slow down is in segment that goes from your computer to your ISP. This is why you should have a good phone line connection – ISDN or Broadband, via cable or satellite. In this way your Internet experience is fully enjoyable.
Once your speed connection is satisfactorily solved, you need to know what you are looking for over Internet and how to find it, if you wish to make your Internet experience productive and worthwhile. I cannot tell you what you should look for, but I can give you some indication on how to find it.
You need to use a search engine like Google, Altavista, Lycoos and others. A search engine is usually appearing to you as a webpage containing at least a title, a blank field and a button to launch search. You need to type in your Internet browser URL of one of these web pages. When you open your Internet Browser – Internet Explorer, Netscape, Monzilla, or Opera or some other – you type in Address field URL of search engine page you wish to access.
