Hello Kids,
You have been hearing this word “internet” quite often and you may even be curious to know what it is. What exactly is this internet?
You may be having a computer at home or at your school. Some of you would have even created a drawing using your
computer.
If you want to show the drawing you
created to your friend, you can do that only by
opening it on your
computer. Imagine, how nice it would be, if there was a way by which you can show your drawing to
your friend by using a
computer in your friend’s home or any other
computer. It is possible through “Internet”.
Like your computer, there are millions and
millions of computers in the world. Imagine how useful it would be, if all these can be connected in some way and the
information or data can be shared across all these computers. That is exactly what “Internet” does.
The Internet is
networking (or in
simple words, connecting)
of various computers linked together, so that
the computer users can access the same
information from any of the computers at different places. By definition, the Internet is nothing but a network of networks.
There are millions of computers connected to the internet. At any point in time, a large amount of information is shared through the internet by billions of people across the world.
The history of the Internet dates back to 1964. A group of
people called DARPA – the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency – developed a system for sharing information on defence research between involved Universities and defence research
facilities.
It was just an electronic mail system using which scientists could raise question and answer each other. It was called as ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency
Network). Scientists
started to experiment
on it and proved that
interlinking of
computers was possible. Then ARPANET became INTERNET when it was expanded for civilian
purposes.
Internet has many uses. One of the most popular uses of internet is for communicating through e-mails. There are many uses such as searching for knowledge, sharing of information, pictures, movies, songs, games, etc., online shopping, ticket booking, and many more.
Just like subscribing to a telephone service, you need to first subscribe to an Internet Service Provider or ISP to
connect your computer to the internet. Once you buy a subscription, the ISP will give you a device called. “Modem”. This is the link between your computer and the internet. There are different types of
connections such as
simple “dial up”– which uses an ordinary telephone to connect to internet, “broad band”– which is a dedicated line with better speed of connectivity and “wireless”– which connects to internet using a
wireless modem.
You can access internet by using a software
application called a “Browser”. Some of the
popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.
A website is a collection of texts, pictures, sounds, data and videos. These are designed in a nice way and accessed through internet. A collection of millions and millions of websites is known as World Wide Web. Just like locating your house by its address, any website can be accessed using its unique address known as “URL” or Uniform Resource Locator.
The URL starts with www (to indicate World Wide Web), followed by the website’s name and type of the website such as .com, .net, .org and so on. For example, the URL for one of the most popular website called “Google” for searching information
(it is also known as search engine) is www.google.com
Next, we will see how to use a browser to access the internet and to browse through some of the most popular websites. |
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