Internet Dictionary
Click on a letter to see the relevant terms: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z
Icon This is a small picture (32 pixels high by 32 pixels wide) that represents a program or data. The home page of this web site uses icons to represent the different text and software products produced by Malvino Inc.
Internaut A term coined from Internet and Astronaut. The astronauts went looking for a new world out in space, and the internauts go looking for a new world in cyberspace.
Internet The Internet is a worldwide network of smaller networks, more than 40,000 in all parts of the world. These smaller networks are located in corporations, universities, government offices, military bases, etc. and are connected through a backbone of telephone cables, fiber optics, and satellites to Global Service Providers (GSP). A GSP can transmit and receive data from any point on the planet. Your Internet service provider (ISP) is one of the smaller networks that has a backbone connection to the Internet. The three major services available on the Internet are the World Wide Web, Newsgroups, and Electronic Mail.
Internet registry This is the organization that registers domain names like malvino.com, assigns IP addresses, and maintains the Whois database.
Interpreter A program that translates a high-level programming language into machine code on a line by line basis. In other words, it translates a line of the program and executes that line. Then, it repeats this translate-execute procedure for all remaining lines in the program. This differs from a compiler where all lines are translated to machine code before executing the program.
Intranet Companies and other organizations have found the concept of web sites to be a very effective way of sharing ideas, data, and other information. An intranet is an IP network that can be accessed only from within an organization. If it's connected to the Internet, a firewall protects the intranet from hacker and cracker infiltration. What's the difference between an intranet and a LAN? An intranet always uses IP whereas a LAN may or may not use this protocol.
IP Internet Protocol The rules by which computers communicate on the Internet. The packet is the basic unit of data sent over the Internet. IP uses dynamic routing of packets, where the source and destination addresses of each packet are examined to determine the best transmission route.
IP address Each web site on the Internet is assigned a unique address called its IP address. For instance, the IP address of this web site is "207.201.155.6". Likewise, each client accessing the Internet is assigned either a permanent IP address (direct connection) or a temporary IP address (dial-up connection). This enables any web site to send TCP/IP packets to any client on the Internet, and vice-versa. IP addresses have the format of 000.000.000.000, a quad of three digits. The format is the same as ordinary decimal numbers (like 123,456,789,000). For instance, a computer could have an IP address of 123.987.456.321. Since IP addresses range from 000.000.000.000 to 999.999.999.999, the total number of unique IP addresses is 1 trillion addresses, equivalent to 1000 billion addresses. Since the population of this planet is less than 5 billion, there is little danger of running out of IP addresses. (See TCP/IP.)
ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network. This combines voice and digital telecommunications over POTS (ordinary) telephone lines at speeds of 128 Kbps without using compression.
ISP An abbreviation for Internet service provider. An ISP assigns an IP address to your computer and then connects it to the Internet. Typical ISP's are Netcom, MCI, Pacific Bell, etc. ISPs are typically large regional networks within the Internet. As such, they either deliver customer traffic to the destination address within their region or to a global service provider who delivers it to any destination in the world. On-line services like AOL, CompuServe, and Delphi are different from ISPs. On-line services are content providers because they deliver their own special services. On-line services usually include a gateway to the Internet.
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