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Address resolution Conversion of an Internet address to the corresponding physical address. On an ethernet, resolution requires broadcasting on the local area network.

Administrivia Administrative tasks, most often related to the maintenance of mailing lists, digests, news gateways, etc.

ADN (Advanced Digital Network) Usually refers to a 56Kbps leased-line.

AIFF A sound file format

Anchor A synonym for hyperlink

Anonymous FTP Also known as anon FTP; a service provided to make files available to the general Internet community.

ANSI (American National Standards Institute) ANSI disseminates basic standards like ASCII, and acts as the United States' delegate to the ISO.

Archie A tool (software) for finding files stored on anonymous FTP sites. You need to know the exact file name or a sub-string of it. A method of searching for files on anonymous FTP servers

Archive server An email-based file transfer facility offered by some systems.

ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) Former name of DARPA, the government agency that funded ARPAnet and later the DARPA Internet.

ARPAnet (Advanced Research Projects Administration Network) The precursor to the Internet. Developed in the late 60's and early 70's by the US Department of Defense as an experiment in wide-area networking that would survive a nuclear war. The ARPAnet consisted of individual packet switching computers interconnected by leased lines. The ARPAnet no longer exists as a singular entity.

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) The de facto world-wide standard for the code numbers used by computers to represent all the upper and lower-case latin letters, numbers, punctuation, etc. There are 128 standard ASCII codes each of which can be represented by a 7 digit binary number: 0000000 through 1111111

Asynchronous Transmission by individual bytes, not related to specific timing on the transmitting end.

au A sound ('au'dio) file format

Auto-magic Something which happens pseudo-automatically, and is usually too complex to go into any further than to say it happens 'auto-magically'.

B

Backbone A high-speed connection within a network that connects shorter, usually slower circuits. Also used in reference to a system that acts as a 'hub' for activity (although those are becoming much less prevalent now than they were ten years ago).

Bandwidth The capacity of a medium to transmit a signal. More informally, the mythical 'size' of The Net, and its ability to carry the files and messages of those that use it. Some view certain kinds of traffic (FTPing hundreds of graphics images, for example) as a 'waste of bandwidth' and look down on them. Usually measured in bits-per-second. A full page of english text is about 16,000 bits. A fast modem can move about 15,000 bits in one second. Full-motion full-screen video would require roughly 10,000,000 bits-per-second, depending on compression. See also: Bps, Bit, T-1

Baud In common usage the 'baud rate' of a modem is how many bits it can send or receive per second. Technically 'baud' is the number of times per second that the carrier signal shifts value - so a 1200 bit-per-second modem actually runs at 300 baud, but it moves 4 bits per baud (4 x 300 = 1200 bits per second). See also: bit, modem

BBS (Bulletin Board System or Service) A computerized meeting and announcement system that allows people to carry on discussions, upload and download files, and make announcements without the people being connected to the computer at the same time. There are many thousands (millions?) of BBS's around the world, most are very small, running on a single IBM clone PC with 1 or 2 phone lines. Some are very large and the line between a BBS and a system like CompuServe gets crossed at some point, but it is not clearly drawn.

BinHex (BINary HEXadecimal) A method for converting non-text files (non-ASCII) into ASCII. This is needed because Internet e-mail can only handle ASCII. See also: ASCII

Bit (Binary DigIT) A single digit number in base-2, in other words, either a 1 or a zero. The smallest unit of digital data. Bandwidth is usually measured in bits-per-second. See also Bandwidth, Bps, Byte, Kilobyte, and Megabyte

BITNET (Because It's Time Network) A network of educational sites separate from the Internet, but e-mail is freely exchanged between BITNET and the Internet. Listservs, the most popular form of e-mail discussion groups, originated on BITNET. BITNET machines are IBM VMS machines, and the network is probably the only international network that is shrinking.

Bounce The return of a piece of mail because of an error in its delivery.

Bps (Bits-Per-Second). A measurement of how fast data is moved from one place to another. A 28.8 modem can move 28,800 bits per second. See also: Bandwidth, Bit

Browser A client program or information retrieval tool (software) that is used to look at various kinds of Internet resources. See also: Client, URL, WWW

BTW By The Way.

Byte A set of Bits that represent a single character. Usually there are 8 bits in a Byte, sometimes more, depending on how the measurement is being made.

C

CERN European particle physics research facility and birthplace of the World Wide Web, HTTP and HTML. Located in Geneva, Switzerland.

CFV (Call For Votes) Initiates the voting period for a Usenet newsgroup. At least one (occasionally two or more) email address is customarily included as a repository for the votes. See Newsgroup Creation for a full description of the Usenet voting process.

Client The user of a network service; a computer that relies upon another for some or all of its resources.; a software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a Server software program on another computer, often across a great distance. Each Client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of Server programs, and each Server requires a specific kind of Client. See also: Server

Cyberspace A term coined by William Gibson in his fantasy novel Neuromancer to describe the 'world' of computers, and the society that gathers around them; the word Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources available through computer networks.

D

Datagram The basic unit of information passed across the Internet. It contains a source and destination address along with data. Large messages are broken down into a sequence of IP datagrams.

Disassembling Converting a binary program into human-readable machine language code.

DNS (Domain Name System) The method used to convert Internet names to their corresponding Internet numbers.

Domain Name The unique name that identifies an Internet site. Domain Names always have 2 or more parts, separated by dots. The part on the left is the most specific, and the part on the right is the most general. A given machine may have more than one Domain Name but a given Domain Name points to only one machine. Usually, all of the machines on a given network will have the same thing as the right-hand portion of their Domain Names. It is also possible for a Domain Name to exist but not be connected to an actual machine. This is often done so that a group or business can have an Internet e-mail address without having to establish a real Internet site. In these cases, some real Internet machine must handle the mail on behalf of the listed Domain Name. See also: IP Number.

Domain A part of the naming hierarchy. Syntactically, a domain name consists of a sequence of names or other words separated by dots.

Dotted quad A set of four numbers connected with periods that make up an Internet address; for example, 147.31.254.130.

E

E-mail (Electronic Mail) Messages, usually text, sent from one person to another via computer. E-mail can also be sent automatically to a large number of addresses (Mailing List) See also: Listserv, Maillist

Email address The unique UUCP or domain-based address that refers to a user.

Ethernet A 10-million bit per second networking scheme originally developed by Xerox Corporation. Ethernet is widely used for LANs because it can network a wide variety of computers, it is not proprietary, and components are widely available from many commercial sources. Ethernet will handle about 10,000,000 bits-per-second and can be used with almost any kind of computer. See also: Bandwidth, LAN

F

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) FAQs are documents that list and answer the most common questions on a particular subject. There are hundreds of FAQs on subjects as diverse as Pet Grooming and Cryptography. FAQs are usually written by people who have tired of answering the same question over and over

FDDI (Fibre Distributed Data Interface) A standard for transmitting data on optical fiber cables at a rate of around 100,000,000 bits-per-second (10 time as fast as Ethernet, about twice as fast as T-3 ) The access control mechanism uses token ring technology. See also: Bandwidth, Ethernet, T-1, T-3

Finger An Internet software tool for locating people on other Internet sites. Finger is also sometimes used to give access to non-personal information, but the most common use is to see if a person has an account at a particular Internet site. Many sites do not allow incoming Finger requests, but many do

Flame A piece of mail or a Usenet posting which is violently argumentative.

FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) The FQDN is the full site name of a system, rather than just its hostname. For example, the system lisa at Widener University has a FQDN of lisa.cs.widener.edu.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) The Internet standard high-level protocol for transferring files from one computer to another. FTP is a special way to login to another Internet site for the purposes of retrieving and/or sending files. There are many Internet sites that have established publicly accessible repositories of material that can be obtained using FTP, by logging in using the account name 'anonymous', thus these sites are called 'anonymous ftp servers'

FYI (For Your Information) There is a series of RFCs put out by the Network Information Center called FYIs; they address common questions of new users and many other useful things. RFCs for instructions on retrieving FYIs.

G

Gateway A special-purpose dedicated computer that attaches to two or more networks and routes packets from one network to the other. In particular, an Internet gateway routes IP datagrams among the networks it connects. Gateways route packets to other gateways until they can be delivered to the final destination directly across one physical network. The technical meaning is a hardware or software set-up that translates between two dissimilar protocols, for example Prodigy has a gateway that translates between its internal, proprietary e-mail format and Internet e-mail format. Another, sloppier meaning of gateway is to describe any mechanism for providing access to another system, e.g. AOL might be called a gateway to the Internet

GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) An image file format

Gopher A text based distributed information system, developed at the University of Minnesota. It allows world-wide topic searching and file retrieval via menus of material available over the Internet. Gopher is a Client-Server system, which requires that the user has a Gopher Client program. Although Gopher has spread rapidly across the globe in only a couple of years, it is being largely supplanted by the World Wide Web. See also: Client, Server, WWW, Hypertext

H

Header The portion of a packet, preceding the actual data, containing source and destination addresses and error-checking fields. Also part of a message or news article.

Host Any computer on a network that is a repository for services available to other computers on the network. It is quite common to have one host machine provide several services, such as WWW and USENET See also: Node, Network

Hostname The name given to a machine. (See also FQDN.)

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) The coding language used create Hypertext documents for use on the World Wide Web. Documents displayed by Netscape Navigator and NCSA Mosaic are HTML documents. These documents are characterized by the .html or .htm file extension.For example: homepage.html or homepage.htm. HTML looks a lot like old-fashioned typesetting code, where you surround a block of text with codes that indicate how it should appear, additionally, in HTML you can specify that a block of text, or a word, is 'linked' to another file on the Internet. See also: HTTP, Hypertext, Mosaic, WWW

HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol) The protocol for moving hypertext files across the Internet. Requires a HTTP client program on one end, and an HTTP server program on the other end. HTTP is the most important protocol used in the World Wide Web (WWW). See also: Client, Server, WWW

Hypergraphics A term describing non-linear navigation through documents. Hypergraphics are achieved by linking graphics with other destinations on the same or different pages.

Hyperlink A link in a given document to information within another document. These links are usually represented by highlighted words or images. The user also has the option to underline these hyperlinks

Hypermedia Richly formatted documents (Hypertext and Hypergraphics) containing a variety of information types, such as text, image, movie, and audio. These information types are easily found through hyperlinks.

Hypertext Any text that contains 'links' to other documents - words or phrases in the document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be retrieved and displayed

I

IMHO (In My Humble Opinion) A shorthand appended to a comment written in an online forum, IMHO indicates that the writer is aware that they are expressing a debatable view, probably on a subject already under discussion. One of many such shorthands in common use online, especially in discussion forums

In-line image A graphic image that is displayed with an html document.

Internet address (Also Internet number) The dotted-quad address (eg. 147.31.254.130) used to specify a host computer. The 32-bit Internet address is made up of a network number, a subnetwork number, and a host number. Each host computer on the Internet, has a unique address. All Internet hosts have a numeric address and an English-style name.A Resolver is used to translate between hostnames and Internet addresses.

Internet A global network of networks connecting millions of computers. It was devised by the US Department of Defence in the height of the Cold War to allow the government to continue the flow of information in the event of a nuclear strike. It was later inherited by the National Science Foundation. A concatenation of many individual TCP/IP campus, state, regional, and national networks (such as NSFnet, ARPAnet, and Milnet) into one single logical network all sharing a common addressing scheme. A vast collection of inter-connected networks that all use the TCP/IP protocols and that evolved from the ARPANET of the late 60's and early '70s.

Interoperate The ability of multi-vendor computers to work together using a common set of protocols. With interoperability, PCs, Macs, Suns, Dec VAXen, CDC Cybers, etc, all work together allowing one host computer to communicate with and take advantage of the resources of another.

IP Number or IP Address Sometimes called a "dotted quad". A unique number consisting of 4 parts separated by dots, e.g. 165.113.245.2 Every machine that is on the Internet has a unique IP number - if a machine does not have an IP number, it is not really on the Internet. Most machines also have one or more Domain Names that are easier for people to remember. See also: Domain Name, Internet

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) A huge multi-user live chat facility. There are a number major IRC servers around the world which are linked to each other. Anyone can create a 'channel' and anything that anyone types in a given channel is seen by all others in the channel. Private channels can (and are) created for multi-person 'conference calls'.

ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) A way to move more data over existing regular phone lines.

ISO (International Organization for Standardization) Coordinator of the main networking standards that are put into use today.

J

JPEG A method of storing an image in a compressed digital format specified by the Joint Photographic Experts Group

K

Kernel The level of an operating system or networking system that contains the system-level commands or all of the functions hidden from the user. In a Unix system, the kernel is a program that contains the device drivers, the memory management routines, the scheduler, and system calls. This program is always running while the system is operating.

Kilobyte In general parlance a thousand bytes, but mathematically 1024 (2 raised to the power of 10) bytes. See also: Byte, Bit

L

LAN (Local Area Network) Any physical network technology that operates at high speed over short distances (up to a few thousand meters).

Leased-line A phone line that is rented for exclusive 24-hour, 7-days-a-week use from your location to another location. The highest speed data connections require a leased line. See also: 56K, T-1, T-3

Listserv The most common kind of maillist , Listervs originated on BITNET but they are now common on the Internet See also: BITNET, E-mail, Maillist

Login Noun: The account name used to gain access to a computer system. Not a secret (contrast with Password) Verb: The act of entering into a computer system. See also: Password

M

Majordomo A program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintainance. Once a list is set up, virtually all operations can be performed remotely, requiring no intervention upon the postmaster of the list site. (from 'majordomo' - n: a person who speaks, makes arrangements, or takes charge for another. From latin 'major domus' - 'master of the house'.)

MacTCP The necessary network software from Apple Computer that allows Macintoshes to interact with the other computers via TCP/IP

Mail gateway A machine that connects to two or more electronic mail systems (especially dissimilar mail systems on two different networks) and transfers mail messages among them.

Mail path A series of machine names used to direct electronic mail from one user to another.

Mailing list (also Maillist)A possibly moderated discussion group, distributed via email from a central computer maintaining the list of people involved in the discussion. A system that allows people to send e-mail to one address, whereupon their message is copied and sent to all of the other subscribers to the maillist. In this way, people who have many different kinds of e-mail access can participate in discussions together. See also: Listserv

Medium The material used to support the transmission of data. This can be copper wire, coaxial cable, optical fiber, or electromagnetic wave (as in microwave).

Megabyte A million bytes. A thousand kilobytes. See also: Byte, Bit, Kilobyte

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) A method of identifying files such that the first packet of information received by a client, contains information about the type of file the server has sent. For example text, audio, movie, postscript, word document

Modem (MOdulator, DEModulator) A device that you connect to your computer and to a phone line, that allows the computer to talk to other computers through the phone system. Basically, modems do for computers what a telephone does for humans.

MOO (Mud, Object Oriented) One of several kinds of multi-user role-playing environments, so far only text-based. See also: MUD, MUSE

Mosaic The first WWW browser that was available for the Macintosh, Windows and UNIX all with the same interface. "Mosaic" really started the popularity of the Web. The source-code to Mosaic has been licensed by several companies and there are several other pieces of software as good or better than Mosaic, most notably Netscape Navigator. See also: Browser, Client, WWW

MPEG Moving Pictures Experts Group, a method of storing movie files in digital format

MUD (Multi-User Dungeon or Dimension) A multi-user simulation environment. Some are purely for fun and flirting, others are used for serious software development, or education purposes and all that lies in between. A significant feature of most MUDs is that users can create things that stay after they leave and which other users can interact with in their absence, thus allowing a "world" to be built gradually and collectively. See also: MOO, MUSE Multimedia The presentation of information using more than a single delivery system; can include any combination of text, graphics, hypermedia, sound, animation, video, people, etc.

Multiplex The division of a single transmission medium into multiple logical channels supporting many simultaneous sessions. For example, one network may have simultaneous FTP, telnet, rlogin, and SMTP connections, all going at the same time.

MUSE One kind of MUD - usually with little or no violence. See also: MOO, MUD

N

NCSA The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign,Illinois.

Net.citizen An inhabitant of Cyberspace. One tries to be a good net.citizen, lest one be flamed.

Netiquette Proper behavior on The Net.

Network A group of machines connected together so they can transmit information to one another. Connect two or more computers together so that they can share resources and you have a computer network.

News-groups Discussion groups on Usenet, devoted to a specific topic; some are moderated, many are not; currently about 9000 groups exist, and the list grows daily.

NFS (Network File System) A method developed by Sun Microsystems to allow computers to share files across a network in a way that makes them appear as if they're 'local'to the system.

NIC (Network Information Center) Generally, any office that handles information for a network. The most famous of these on the Internet is the InterNIC, which is where new domain names are registered.

Node A computer that is attached to a network; also called a host.

NSFnet The national backbone network, funded by the National Science Foundation and operated by the Merit Corporation, used to interconnect regional (mid-level) networks such as WestNet to one another.

O

P

Packet Switching The method used to move data around on the Internet. In packet switching, all the data coming out of a machine is broken up into chunks, each chunk has the address of where it came from and where it is going. This enables chunks of data from many different sources to co-mingle on the same lines, and be sorted and directed to different routes by special machines along the way. This way many people can use the same lines at the same time.

Packet The unit of data sent across a packet switching network. The term is used loosely. While some Internet literature uses it to refer specifically to data sent across a physical network, other literature views the Internet as a packet switching network and describes IP datagrams as packets.

Password A code used to gain access to a locked system. Good passwords contain letters and non-letters and are not simple combinations. See also: Login

Polling Connecting to another system to check for things like mail or news.

POP Two commonly used meaning: 'Point of Presence' and 'Post Office Protocol'. A 'Point of Presence'usually means a city or location where a network can be connected to, often with dialup phone lines, so if an Internet company says they will soon have a POP in Belgrade, it means that they will soon have a local phone number in Belgrade and/or a place where leased lines can connect to their network. A second meaning, 'Post Office Protocol' refers to the way e-mail software such as Eudora gets mail from a mail server. When you obtain a SLIP, PPP, or shell account you almost always get a POP account with it, and it is this POP account that you tell your e-mail software to use to get your mail. See also: SLIP, PPP

Port First and most generally, a place where information goes into or out of a computer, or both, e.g. the 'serial port' on a personal computer is where a modem would be connected. On the Internet 'port' often refers to a number that is part of a URL, appearing after a colon (:) right after the domain name. Every service on an Internet server 'listens' on a particular port number on that server. Most services have standard port number, e.g. Web servers normally listen on port 80. Services can also listen on non-standard ports, in which case the port number must be specified in a URL when accessing the server, so you might see a URL of the form 'gopher://peg.cwis.uci.edu:7000/' which shows a gopher server running on a non-standard port (the standard gopher port is 70). Finally, 'port' also refers to translating a piece of software to bring it from one type of computer system to another, e.g. to translate a Windows program so that it will run on a Macintosh. See also: Domain Name, Server, URL

Postmaster The person responsible for taking care of mail problems, answering queries about users, and other related work at a site.

PostScript A page description language developed by Adobe Systems

PPP (Point to Point Protocol) Most well known as a protocol that allows a computer to use a regular telephone line and a modem to make a TCP/IP connection and thus be really and truly on the Internet. PPP is gradually replacing SLIP for this purpose. See also: IP number, Internet, SLIP, TCP/IP

Protocol A planned method of exchanging data over the Internet. A formal description of message formats and the rules two computers must follow to exchange those messages. Protocols can describe low-level details of machine-to-machine interfaces (e.g., the order in which bits and bytes are sent across a wire) or high-level exchanges between allocation programs (e.g., the way in which two programs transfer a file across the Internet).

Q

QuickTime A method of storing movie and audio files in a digital format developed by Apple Computer

R

Recursion The facility of a programming language to be able to call functions from within themselves.

resolve Translate an Internet name into its equivalent IP address or other DNS information.

RFC (Request For Comments). The name of the result and the process for creating a standard on the Internet. New standards are proposed and published on line, as a 'Request For Comments'. The Internet Engineering Task Force is a consensus-building body that facilitates discussion, and eventually a new standard is established, but the reference number/name for the standard retains the acronym 'RFC', e.g. the official standard for e-mail is RFC 822.

RFD (Request For Discussion) Usually a two- to three-week period in which the particulars of newsgroup creation are battled out.

Route The path that network traffic takes from its source to its destination.

Router A dedicated computer (or other device) that sends packets from one place to another, paying attention to the current state of the network. Routers spend all their time looking at the destination addresses of the packets passing through them and deciding which route to send them on. See also: Network, Packet Switching

RTFM (Read The F***ing Manual). This anacronym is often used when someone asks a simple or common question.

S

Server A computer that acts as an intermediate storage area for other computers connected to it via a network such as the Internet A computer, or a software package, that provides a specific kind of service to client software running on other computers. The term can refer to a particular piece of software, such as a WWW server, or to the machine on which the software is running, e.g. 'Our mail server is down today, that's why e-mail isn't getting out.' A single server machine could have several different server software packages running on it, thus providing many different services to clients on the network. See also: Client, Network

SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). A standard encoding scheme for creating textual information. HTML is a subset of SGML

Signal-to-noise ratio When used in reference to Usenet activity, signal-to-noise ratio describes the relation between amount of actual information in a discussion, compared to their quantity. More often than not, there's substantial activity in a newsgroup, but a very small number of those articles actually contain anything useful.

Signature The small, usually four-line message at the bottom of a piece of email or a Usenet article. In Unix, it's added by creating a file ..signature in the user's home directory. Large signatures are a no-no.

SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) A standard for using a regular telephone line (a 'serial line') and a modem to connect a computer as a real Internet site. SLIP is gradually being replaced by PPP. See also: Internet, PPP

SMDS (Switched Multimegabit Data Service) A new standard for very high-speed data transfer.

SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) The Internet standard protocol for transferring electronic mail messages from one computer to another. SMTP specifies how two mail systems interact and the format of control messages they exchange to transfer mail.

Socket The interface between, for example, a browser and the utility software which allows client PCs to transact data over the Internet using the TCP/IP network protocol.

Static page A page displayed on the World Wide Web that contains no hypermedia.

Summarize To encapsulate a number of responses into one coherent, usable message. Often done on controlled mailing lists or active newsgroups, to help reduce bandwidth.

Synchronous Data communications in which transmissions are sent at a fixed rate, with the sending and receiving devices synchronized.

T

T-1 A leased-line connection capable of carrying data at 1,544,000 bits -per-second. At maximum theoretical capacity, a T-1 line could move a megabyte in less than 10 seconds. That is still not fast enough for full-screen, full-motion video, for which you need at least 10,000,000 bits-per-second. T-1 is the fastest speed commonly used to connect networks to the Internet . See also: 56K, Bandwidth, Bit, Byte, Ethernet, T-3

T-3 A leased-line connection capable of carrying data at 45,000,000 bits-per-second. This is more than enough to do full-screen, full-motion video. See also: 56K, Bandwidth, Bit, Byte, Ethernet, T-1

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) A set of rules that establishes the method with which data is transmitted over the Internet between two computers. The suite of protocols that defines The Internet. Originally designed for the UNIX operating system, TCP/IP software is now available for every major kind of computer operating system. To be truly on the Internet , your computer must have TCP/IP software. See also: IP number, Internet, UNIX

Telnet The Internet standard protocol for remote terminal connection service. Telnet allows a user at one site to interact with a remote timesharing system at another site as if the user's terminal were connected directly to the remote computer.

Terminal Server A special purpose computer that has places to plug in many modems on one side, and a connection to a LAN or host machine on the other side. Thus the terminal server does the work of answering the calls and passes the connections on to the appropriate node . Most terminal servers can provide PPP or SLIP services if connected to the Internet. See also: LAN, Modem, Host, Node, PPP, SLIP

Terminal A device that allows you to send commands to a computer somewhere else. This usually means a keyboard and a display screen and some simple circuitry. usually you will use terminal software in a personal computer - the software pretends to be ('emulates') a physical terminal and allows you to type commands to a computer somewhere else.

Twisted pair Cable made up of a pair of insulated copper wires wrapped around each other to cancel the effects of electrical noise.

U

UNIX A computer operating system (the basic software running on a computer, underneath things like word processors and spreadsheets). UNIX is designed to be used by many people at the same time (it is "multi-user") and has TCP/IP built-in. It is the most common operating system for servers on the Internet

URL (Uniform Resource Locator) The address to a source of information on the Internet. The URL contains four distinct parts, the protocol type, the machine name, the directory path and the file name. For example: http://www.webhead.gen.nz/index.htm. See also: Browser, WWW

Usenet A world-wide system of discussion groups, with comments passed among hundreds of thousands of machines. Not all Usenet machines are on the Internet. Usenet is completely decentralized, with over 10,000 discussion areas, called newsgroups. See Also: Newsgroup

UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Program) A store-and-forward system, primarily for Unix systems but currently supported on other platforms (e.g. VMS and personal computers).

V

Veronica (Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) Developed at the University of Nevada, Veronica is a constantly updated database of the names of almost every menu item on thousands of gopher servers. The Veronica database can be searched from most major gopher menus. See also: Gopher

W

WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) A commercial database system that indexes large quantities of information and then makes those indices searchable across networks such as the Internet. A prominent feature of WAIS is that the search results are ranked ('scored') according to how relevant the 'hits' are, and that subsequent searches can find 'more stuff like that last batch' and thus refine the search process.

WAN (Wide Area Network) Any network that covers an area larger than a single building or campus. See also: Internet, LAN, Network

WHOIS Displays information on any member of the Internet community.

Workstation A networked personal computing device with more power than a standard IBM PC or Macintosh. Typically, a workstation has an operating system such as unix that is capable of running several tasks at the same time. It has several megabytes of memory and a large, high-resolution display. Examples are Sun workstations and Digital DECstations.

World Wide Web A distributed HyperText-based information system conceived at CERN to provide its user community with an easy way to access global information. See also: Browser, FTP, Gopher, HTTP, Telnet, URL, WAIS

Worm A computer program which replicates itself. The Internet worm (The Internet Worm) was perhaps the most famous; it successfully (and accidentally) duplicated itself on systems across the Internet.

Wrt With respect to.

X

XBM (X Bit Map) A simple image format. XBMs only appear in black and white and you will find them in-line in HTML documents

Y

Z

Zip File compression standard.

My address is douaine@webhead.gen.nz