​I understand and can explain terms associated with networking and telecommunications hardware and software, such as:

​• WIDE AREA NETWORK (WAN)
• LOCAL AREA NETWORK (LAN)
• THE INTERNET
• THE WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW)

​• NETWORK SERVER
• BROWSER
• SEARCH ENGINE
• E-MAIL

• Wide Area Network (WAN)
  • A WAN (wide area network), in comparison to a MAN, is not restricted to a geographical location, although it might be confined within the bounds of a state or country. A WAN connects several LANs, and may be limited to an enterprise (a corporation or an organization) or accessible to the public. The technology is high speed and relatively expensive. The Internet is an example of a worldwide public WAN.
• Local Area Network (LAN)
  • A LAN (local area network) is a group of computers and network devices connected together, usually within the same building. By definition, the connections must be high speed and relatively inexpensive (e.g., token ring orEthernet). Most Indiana University Bloomington departments are on LANs.
  • A LAN connection is a high-speed connection to a LAN. On the IUB campus, most connections are either Ethernet (10 Mbps) or Fast Ethernet (100 Mbps), and a few locations have Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps) connections.
•  The Internet
  • The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.
  • Quick Points about The Internet:
    • It is a global network connecting millions of computers.
    • The Internet is decentralized.
    • Each Internet computer is independent.
    • There are a variety of ways to access the Internet.
    • There are more than 3,700,000,000 Internet Users in the world.
• The World Wide Web (WWW)
  • The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.
  • Quick Points about The Web:
    • It is a system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents.
    • Documents are formatted in a markup language that supports links to other documents.
    • You can jump from one document to another simply by clicking on hot spots (hyperlinks).
    • Applications called Web browsers that make it easy to access the World Wide Web.There are more than 1,275,000,000 Websites.
• Network server
  • A server is a type of computer or device on a networkthat manages network resources. Servers are often dedicated, meaning that they perform no other tasks besides their server tasks. On multiprocessing operating systems, however, a single computer can execute several programs at once. A server in this case could refer to the program that is managing resources rather than the entire computer.
• Browser
  • Short for Web browser, a browser is a software application used to locate, retrieve and display content on the World Wide Web, including Web pages, images, video and other files. As aclient/server model, the browser is the client run on a computer that contacts the Web server and requests information. The Web serversends the information back to the browser which displays the results on the computer or other Internet-enabled device that supports a browser.
• Search engine
  • Search engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.
• E-mail
  • Short for electronic mail, e-mail or email is information stored on a computer that is exchanged between two users over telecommunications. More plainly, e-mail is a message that may contain text, files, images, or other attachments sent through a network to a specified individual or group of individuals. The first e-mail was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971. By 1996, more electronic mail was being sent than postal mail.