New users joining the Internet community have the same questions as did everyone else who has ever joined. Our quest is to provide the Internet community with up to date, basic Internet knowledge and experience.

What is Internet ?
The Internet is a worldwide network of networks.It is a conglomeration of smaller Networks and other connected machines spanning the entire globe.

How Internet has been evolved ?
The Internet was born about 20 yers ago,trying to connect together a U.S defense department network called the ARPANET.The ARPANET was an experimental network designed to support military research.In 1984 the National Science Foundation established the NSFNET.By 1987 there were so many people using NSFNET,and so many sites connected to it,that a massive overhaul of the infrastructure was requiredto just sustain the load.By 1990 the Internet as we know it today has begun.And since then,the growth of the net has been simply phenominal.

Who governs the Internet ?
Nobody really.The Internet is such a huge and diverse creature,everybody barrows pieces of it.It is very much a global resource,which grows and develops almost organically.

How many users are there on the network approxmately ?
The number of users has grown from 5,000 people to 30 million in just ten years;that's staggering increase of 6000 percent! Internauts are growing at the rate of one million per month

 

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What the users actually doing on Internet ?
Just about everything.There is electronic mail,file transfer,information browsing and retrieval,social communication,news gathering ... People even conduct their business on Internet.It's an incredibly useful tool -and lots of fun as well.

How the small networks(LANs) are interconnected ?
The small networks that comprise the INTERNET are connected each other by something called routers.Routers are needed to help decide how to transmit data most efficiently across different parts of the network.

I just got on the Internet. What can I do now?
You now have access to all the resources you are authorized to use on your own Internet host, on any other Internet host on which you have an account, and on any other Internet host that offers publicly accessible information. The Internet gives you the ability to move information between these hosts via file transfers. Once you are logged into one host, you can use the Internet to open a connection to another, login, and use its services interactively (this is known as remote login or "TELNETing"). In addition, you can send electronic mail to users at any Internet site and to users on many non-Internet sites that are accessible via electronic mail. There are various other services you can use. For example, some hosts provide access to specialized databases or to archives of information. The Internet Resource Guide provides information regarding some of these sites. The Internet Resource Guide lists facilities on the Internet that are available to users. Such facilities include supercomputer centers, library catalogs and specialized data collections. The guide is maintained by the Directory Services portion of the InterNIC and is available online in a number of ways. It is available for anonymous FTP from the host ds.internic.net in the resource-guide directory. It is also readable via the InterNIC gopher (gopher internic.net). For more information, contact admin@ds.internic.net or call the InterNIC at (800) 444-4345 or (908) 668-6587. Today the trend for Internet information services is to strive to present the users with a friendly interface to a variety of services. The goal is to reduce the traditional needs for a user to know the source host of a service and the different command interfaces for different types of services. The Internet Gopher (discussed more in the "Questions about Internet Services" section) is one such service to which you have access when you join the Internet.

How do I get a list of all the hosts on the Internet?
You really don't want that. The list includes more than 1.5 million hosts. Almost all of them require that you have access permission to actually use them. You may really want to know which of these hosts provide services to the Internet community. Investigate using some of the network resource discovery tools, such as gopher, to gain easier access to Internet information.

What is TCP/IP?
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) [4,5,6] is the common name for a family of over 100 data-communications protocols used to organize computers and data-communications equipment into computer networks. TCP/IP was developed to interconnect hosts on ARPANET, PRNET (packet radio), and SATNET (packet satellite). All three of these networks have since been retired; but TCP/IP lives on. It is currently used on a large international network of networks called the Internet, whose members include universities, other research institutions, government facilities, and many corporations. TCP/IP is also sometimes used for other networks, particularly local area networks that tie together numerous different kinds of computers or tie together engineering workstations.

What are the other well-known standard protocols in the TCP/IP family?
Other than TCP and IP, the three main protocols in the TCP/IP suite are the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) [8], the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) [3], and the TELNET Protocol [9]. There are many other protocols in use on the Internet. The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) regularly publishes an RFC [2] that describes the state of standardization of the various Internet protocols. This document is the best guide to the current status of Internet protocols and their recommended usage.

What is the Domain Name System?
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical, distributed method of organizing the name space of the Internet. The DNS administratively groups hosts into a hierarchy of authority that allows addressing and other information to be widely distributed and maintained. A big advantage to the DNS is that using it eliminates dependence on a centrally-maintained file that maps host names to addresses.