Mouseclix

By: Hobie Lunin

The Internet revisited.

I see many students who go on the Internet, but still are not too clear how it all works. Most confusion seems to be in not knowing what they are looking at. This often means that they do not know the difference between being on-line or off-line and not understanding the difference, e.g., between and ISP and a web page.

I recently got the question “If I am on AOL, can I get Yahoo? The answer is yes and the first thing to understand is that Yahoo is a series of web pages and NOT an Internet Service Provider (ISP). AOL is an ISP but also has web pages. Web pages are designed and edited by anyone who wants to have a web site. These pages are stored on large computers that are called servers. When you go on-line you are connecting your computer by phone line or cable or even satellite to an Internet Service Provider. These are the people that charge you anywhere from $10 per month to almost $50 per month. The service they perform is to send you copies of the web pages you ask to see when you click on a link or type a web address in your browser.

The browser is the software that allows you to “see” the web pages, which are actually stored in the servers using code called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). The two most popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape. The browser, in addition to interpreting the code of the Internet, so you can easily read it, also allows you to put in a new web address (URL, Universal Resource Locator) in a window (field) that is labeled “address” at the left end and “go” at the other. When you enter the web address and click on Go or Enter, that is when the ISP sends you a copy (snapshot if you will) of the page you want. This page can be anywhere in the world but takes just a second or two to appear on your screen.

Yahoo, as I said, is a series of web pages. It is also referred to as a portal and a search engine. I will explain these terms next. A portal is a site that helps you find other sites. There are plenty of these, Yahoo being one of the oldest. On its main page you will see hundreds of sites that you can connect to. On any subject these pointers or links are often referred to as “Yahoos” so that you will see “More Yahoos” in various places on the site. All these Yahoos are links to pages on the Internet. Remember, there are more pages on the Internet than there are people on this planet!

Yahoo is also referred to as a search engine and I do believe that it was the very first search engine. If you notice on their main page, a little below the address field is another field that is not quite as wide and which has the word search at the right end. Here you can enter a word or words to describe something you are looking for and when you click on search, Yahoo, using a number of sophisticated techniques, finds all the pages on the Internet that contain the word or words you have entered. I should add a note here that if you enter more that one word in a search field, you should put quotes at the start of the first word and after the last. This assures that the search engines will look for all these words rather than just some of them. To see a list of portals in current use, see my web site (URL below). Portals are a great place to start a search for something, be it a plane ticket to anywhere or information about a medical problem.

There are several ways to connect to an Internet Service Provider. In addition to using your phone line (referred to as Dial-Up), there is cable connection and DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), which are referred to as Broad Band, and there now is Satellite connection, which is mostly for those who do not live in an area served by any other wide band connection. Wide Band allows the signals (message) to travel faster than on a phone wire, and provides noticeably quicker access to web pages. The only free Internet Connection that I am aware of these days is Juno, which merged with Net Zero. This is a dial-up (phone) connection.

OK, so what about e-mail? E-mail is similar to the Internet but instead of your ISP bringing you a page that you have called for, it takes your e-mail and sends it directly to the server where the recipient has an address. The server is the place that is described in the word or words that follow the @ sign in the e-mail address. There the server puts your mail in a file with the user name of the recipient (the name before the @ sign) and holds it there until the user calls for it when opening their e-mail program.

To review. On-line is when you are connected to the Internet through your Internet Service Provider. You can tell when you are on-line by looking for the symbol of two monitors that appears on the right end of your task bar. Off-line means you are not connected and so anything you are looking at on the monitor is inside your computer. This may include a web page that you have saved in your hard drive.

If you are on-line and have stopped moving your mouse, the ISP may conclude you are not using their service and may disconnect you. This will put you off-line as you were before you got on the Internet

Hobie Lunin is a computer teacher and consultant and can be contacted at mouseclix2@yahoo.com. Previous articles are at http://mouseclix.tripod.com.