Your Internet Consultant - The FAQs of Life Online

Chapter 3: How Does the Internet Work?

• How Does the Internet Work?
  • Making Connections
  • 3.1. I keep hearing about Internet hosts. What is a host?
  • 3.2. How do computers on the Internet talk to one another, or what is TCP/IP?
  • 3.3. What is a domain name?
  • 3.4. What is a fully qualified domain name?
  • 3.5. Can a computer have multiple domain names?
  • 3.6. What is the domain name system?
  • 3.7. What's the .com, .net, or .edu part of the domain name mean?
  • 3.8. What country does the country code ____ correspond to?
  • 3.9. I have both a host name and its IP address. Which should I use?
  • 3.10. My system doesn't understand site names, but it does understand IP addresses. How do I get a site name resolved into an IP address?
  • 3.11. How do I get a list of all the hosts on the Internet?
  • 3.12. How do I find out whether a certain organization has a computer on the Internet?
  • 3.13. How can I tell whether a computer on the Internet is up and running?
  • 3.14. What is that strange notation used to indicate file location, or what's a URL?
  • 3.15. What does HTTP mean?
  • Tools of the Internet
  • 3.16. What is Telnet?
  • 3.17. I can't Telnet to a site. What's wrong?
  • 3.18. What is Gopher?
  • 3.19. What's Veronica?
  • 3.20. What is WAIS?
  • 3.21. What's the World Wide Web?
  • 3.22. Why are there so many different (competing) Internet tools?
  • 3.23. What's all this talk of indexers and navigators?
  • 3.24. Why do we need navigators and front ends for the Internet?
  • 3.25. Can I get more information online about tools for navigating the Internet?
  • Fun with UNIX
  • 3.26. What is UNIX?
  • 3.27. Why is UNIX so prevalent on the Internet?
  • 3.28. Ugh! Do I really have to learn UNIX?
  • 3.29. What should I know about files and directories in UNIX?
  • 3.30. How do I manipulate files with UNIX?
  • 3.31. What other important UNIX commands should I know about?
  • 3.32. Where can I get more help with UNIX online?
  • 3.33. What's a good book to help learn more about UNIX?

This chapter covers questions about what makes the Internet itself tick. Internet gurus like to bandy about lots of terms: domain name system, host, TCP/IP, URL, WWW, UNIX, and so on. Here we'll decode the catch phrases and the alphabet soup. We'll also look at the basics of getting around on the Internet, such as using the UNIX operating system and getting familiar with important tools.

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