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A Page about Computers
and the Internet Some basic terminology: A computer that requests web pages from another computer is called a "client." A computer that delivers those pages is called a "server." Together, these two computers are the components of what's called "the client-server model." The Internet is the largest example of the client-server model thus far. Smaller examples are in every office in the world where many workers share information from a server computer. Sometimes these private client-server networks are really large, as in, for example, global networks maintained by banks or insurance companies, or any large corporation. Or they may be as small as just a few computers connected to a single server in a single office. There are many types of servers. Servers that serve web pages are called, appropriately enough, "web servers." Servers that distribute e-mail are called "mail servers." These are the most obvious forms of server you will interact with. Web servers generally have an FTP server intimately entwined with them. FTP stands for "File Transfer Protocol."Any combination of rules by which computers communicate between themselves is referred to as a "protocol." File Transfer Protocol is one rather specialized protocol. Your e-mail "client" (Microsoft Outlook in your case) actually uses two protocols to communicate with the mail server: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to send mail, and Post Office Protocol (POP) to receive mail. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol that powers the World Wide Web (WWW). The Web is the most well known of the Internet "applications." E-mail and FTP are other examples of Internet applications. In general, any computer program we use to do something useful...a word processor, a spreadsheet, a paint program, is referred to as an "application." The client program for the Web application is called, in general terms, a "browser" or a "Web browser." On most people's computers, it's Internet Explorer (IE). In fact, seventy six percent of people in the world use IE to browse the Internet. Prior to the Bush adminstration the Justice Department was pursuing a giant anti-trust case around Microsoft's sweetheart deals with computer manufacturers that kept other browsers off the computers, but that got shelved when the Shrub was elected. But I digress..... The organization that provides your connection to the Internet is called your "Internet Service Provider.' or "ISP." The organization on whose server your web pages reside is called your "hosting service" or just your "host." In many cases, your ISP and your host may be the same entity. When I say "server space" I mean a portion of the hard disk drive on your host's server computer, that is dedicated to holding (and serving) your web pages. Often the server computer is also referred to as the "host computer," or just "the host." When you develop some web pages on your own computer and you want to move them up to your ISP or host's server computer, you use an FTP client, such as WS-FTP, to do that. |
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