Introduction to Computers

II
CSM 184

Unit 1
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Introduction to the Internet and Web

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 Introduction
• It's no secret that more and more the internet is becoming
an integral part of our everyday lives.
• But if you are new to the online experience, it may be a bit
overwhelming.
• You may be wondering, "What exactly is the internet, and
how does it work?“
• In the early days, most people just used the internet to
search for information.
• Today's internet is a constantly evolving tool, that not only
contains an amazing variety of information, but also provides
new ways of accessing, interacting and connecting with
people and content.

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 Internet
• When most people think of the internet, the first thing
they think about is the World Wide Web.
• Nowadays, the terms "internet" and "World Wide Web"
are often used interchangeably — but they're actually
not the same thing.
• The internet is the physical network of computers all
over the world.
• The World Wide Web is a virtual network of web sites
connected by hyperlinks (or "links").
• Web sites are stored on servers on the internet, so the
World Wide Web is a part of the internet.

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 Internet
• It is the largest network in the world that connects
hundreds of thousands of individual networks all over
the world.
• The popular term for the Internet is the “information
highway”.
• Rather than moving through geographical space, it
moves your ideas and information through cyberspace
– the space of electronic movement of ideas and
information.

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 Internet
• No one owns it
• It has no formal management organization.

• As it was originally developed by the Department of

defense (USA), this lack of centralization made it less
vulnerable to wartime or terrorist attacks.

• To access the Internet, an existing network need to

pay a small registration fee and agree to certain
standards based on the TCP/IP (Transmission Control
Protocol/Internet Protocol) .
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1. Finding Information Online
• The most common way to find information online is
with Search Engine.
• All you have to do is type in a few words, and the
search engine will give you a list of results that you
can click on
• There are many different search engines that you can
use, but Google is the most popular one

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 2. Intelligent Personal Assistants
• If you're using a mobile device, there are some situations
where it's not convenient to type a search into a search
engine. Instead, you can simply talk to your device's
intelligent personal assistant.
• One example is Siri, which comes pre-installed on the iPhone
4S and the iPhone 5.
• With Siri, you can ask a question like "What's the weather
today?” or "Are there any “gob3” restaurants nearby?” Siri
will then try to give you an answer.
• You can also use Siri to do other things on your device such as
setting up reminders. For example, you could say, "Remind me
to go to the dentist on Thursday

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3. Using the Internet to Communicate
• The internet isn't just about finding information. It's also
about connecting with friends, family, and people you've
never met before.

• Today, there are many different ways to communicate

online, including social networking, chat, VoIP, and
blogging.

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Using the Internet to Communicate: Social Networking
• Social networking has become one of the main ways people
keep in touch. Below are a few of the most popular social
networking sites:
 Facebook is used by about one billion people. If you have
family or friends that live far away, you can use Facebook to
keep up with their lives. You can also share things you've
found online that interest you.
Twitter lets you share brief messages (or "tweets") with the
entire world, or with just your circle of friends. By following
people with similar interests, you can discover new things
that you wouldn't have found otherwise.
 LinkedIn is a site that you can use for business networking.
It allows you to connect with other people in your field and
find out about new job opportunities.

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Using the Internet to Communicate: Social Networking

• Chat and Instant Messaging –

Chat and instant messaging programs allow you to have
conversations with your friends or just write them a quick
note. Two examples are Yahoo! Messenger and Microsoft
Messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Some sites, such as Gmail and
Facebook, allow you to chat within your browser.
• VoIP VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
• VoIP allows you to have telephone service through your
internet connection. Some services also let you do video
conferencing, such as Skype and Facebook Video Calling.
Many of these services are free or very inexpensive, and
some people use them as a replacement for a landline, or
just to save minutes on their mobile phones.

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Using the Internet to Communicate: Social Networking
Blogs
• Today, the average user has the ability to shape the web by
adding to it. If you have knowledge or interests that you're
passionate about, you can create your own blog and share
your thoughts with the world.

• There are many sites like blogger.com and wordpress.com

that let you create a blog for free. You don't need any web
design experience— most of the technical stuff has already
been created for you, and you can choose a predesigned
template that has the look and feel that you want.

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 4. Media on the Internet
• TV, radio, and the internet used to be completely separate
things, but that's no longer true with today's technology.
You can now watch TV shows on your computer, and you
can connect to the internet on many TVs and DVD/Blu-ray
players.

• In addition, you can listen to online radio from all over the
world, thus granting you greater access to a more diverse
range of media.

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5. Streaming Media
• TV and radio on the internet are examples of
streaming media, which means the media downloads
while it’s playing so you don't have to wait for it to
download first.

• Not all media is streaming. If you've ever bought

music on the iTunes store, you probably had to wait
for it to download before you could listen to it.

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6. Media Players and Embedded
Media
• Media is often embedded in a web page, which
means that it plays within the web browser. Other
times, you'll use a separate program called a media
player to play it.

• Examples include Windows Media Player and iTunes.

An iPod contains built-in media player software that
can play various types of files.

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7. Online Media on Your TV
• You can now access online TV shows, movies, and music
on your TV.
• Many newer TVs are able to connect to an existing
internet connection. – (Utube, Netflex)
• If yours doesn't have this feature built-in, you can buy a
separate digital media receiver, which is a small device
that connects to your TV.
• Apple TV and Roku are two examples of digital media
receivers. Many game consoles, such as the Xbox 360
and PlayStation 3, can also be used to access online
content.

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 Other uses of the Internet
• Send e-mail messages.
• Send (upload) or receive (down load) files between computers.
• Participate in discussion groups, such as mailing lists and newsgroups.
• Surfing the web.

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 What is Web?
• The Web (World Wide Web) consists of information
organized into Web pages containing text and graphic
images.
• It contains hypertext links, or highlighted keywords
and images that lead to related information.
• A collection of linked Web pages that has a common
theme or focus is called a Web site.
• The main page that all of the pages on a particular
Web site are organized around and link back to is
called the site’s home page.

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How to access the Internet?
• Many schools and businesses have direct access to
the Internet using special high-speed
communication lines and equipment.
• Students and employees can access through the
organization’s local area networks (LAN) or
through their own personal computers.
• Another way to access the Internet is through
Internet Service Provider (ISP).

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How to access the Internet?
• To access the Internet, an existing network need to
pay a small registration fee and agree to certain
standards based on the TCP/IP (Transmission
Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) reference
model.
• Each organization pays for its own networks and its
own telephone bills, but those costs usually exist
independent of the internet.
• The regional Internet companies route and forward
all traffic, and the cost is still only that of a local
telephone call.

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Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• A commercial organization with permanent
connection to the Internet that sells temporary
connections to subscribers.
• Examples:
• Prodigy, America Online, Microsoft network, AT&T
Networks.
• Cloud GHANA, vTechnology Ghana, Teledata ICT
Ltd, MTN, Vodafone, Surfline, Busy 4G, Teledata
ICT, etc

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 How to access the Web?
• Once you have your Internet connection, then you
need special software called a browser to access the
Web.
• Web browsers are used to connect you to remote
computers, open and transfer files, display text and
images.
• Web browsers are specialized programs.
• Examples of Web browser: Netscape Navigator
(Navigator), Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and
Internet Explorer, MS Edge, Safari, Opera

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 Client/Server Structure of the Web

• Web is a collection of files that reside on computers,

called Web servers, that are located all over the world
and are connected to each other through the Internet.
• When you use your Internet connection to become
part of the Web, your computer becomes a Web client
in a worldwide client/server network.
• A Web browser is the software that you run on your
computer to make it work as a web client.

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Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

• The public files on the web servers are ordinary text

files, much like the files used by word-processing
software.
• To allow Web browser software to read them, the text
must be formatted according to a generally accepted
standard.
• The standard used on the web is Hypertext markup
language (HTML).

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Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

• HTML uses codes, or tags, to tell the Web browser software

how to display the text contained in the document.
• For example, a Web browser reading the following line of
text:
<B> A Review of the Book<I>Wind Instruments of
the 18th Century</I></B>

• recognizes the <B> and </B> tags as instructions to display

the entire line of text in bold and the <I> and </I> tags as
instructions to display the text enclosed by those tags in
italics.

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 Addresses on the Web:IP Addressing
• Each computer on the internet does have a unique
identification number, called an IP (Internet Protocol)
address.
• The IP addressing system currently in use on the
Internet uses a four-part number.
• Each part of the address is a number ranging from 0 to
255, and each part is separated from the previous part
by period,
• For example, 106.29.242.17

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 IP Addressing
• The combination of the four IP address parts provides
4.2 billion possible addresses (256 x 256 x 256 x 256).
• This number seemed adequate until 1998.
• Members of various Internet task forces are working to
develop an alternate addressing system that will
accommodate the projected growth.
• However, all of their working solutions require
extensive hardware and software changes throughout
the Internet.

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 Domain Name Addressing
• Most web browsers do not use the IP address to locate
Web sites and individual pages.
• They use domain name addressing.
• A domain name is a unique name associated with a
specific IP address by a program that runs on an
Internet host computer.
• This program, which coordinates the IP addresses and
domain names for all computers attached to it, is called
DNS (Domain Name System ) software.
• The host computer that runs this software is called a
domain name server.
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 Domain Name Addressing

• Domain names can include any number of parts

separated by periods, however most domain names
currently in use have only three or four parts.
• Domain names follow hierarchical model that you can
follow from top to bottom if you read the name from
the right to the left.
• For example, the domain name gsb.uchicago.edu is the
computer connected to the Internet at the Graduate
School of Business (gsb), which is an academic unit of
the University of Chicago (uchicago), which is an
educational institution (edu).

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• How about
• knust.edu.gh
the computer connected to the Internet at the
university knust, an educational institution in Ghana

• No other computer on the Internet has the same

domain name.

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 Uniform Resource Locators
• The IP address and the domain name each identify a particular
computer on the Internet.
• However, they do not indicate where a Web page’s HTML
document resides on that computer.
• To identify a Web pages exact location, Web browsers rely on
Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
• URL is a four-part addressing scheme that tells the Web
browser:
What transfer protocol to use for transporting the file
The domain name of the computer on which the file resides
The pathname of the folder or directory on the computer on
which the file resides
The name of the file
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Structure of a Uniform Resource Locators

protocol pathname

http://www.chicagosymphony.org/civicconcerts/index.htm

Domain name filename

http => Hypertext Transfer Protocol

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HTTP
• The transfer protocol is the set of rules that the computers use to
move files from one computer to another on the Internet.
• The most common transfer protocol used on the Internet is the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
• Two other protocols that you can use on the Internet are the File
Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Telnet Protocol

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How to find information on the Web?
• A number of search tools have been developed and
available to you on certain Web sites that provide
search services to help you find information.
• Examples:
• Google search engine, Bing, AOL
Yahoo  www.yahoo.com
Excite  www.excite.com
Lycos  www.lycos.com
AltaVista  www/alta-vista.com
MSN WebSearch  www.search.msn.com
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 How to find information on the Web?
• You can find information by two basic means.
• Search by Topic and Search by keywords.
• Some search services offer both methods, others only.
• Yahoo offers both.
Search by Topic
You can navigate through topic lists
Search by keywords
You can navigate by entering a keyword or phase into a
search text box.

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