Week 2 -What is the Internet?

Week 2 Topic 1.1: What is the Internet?

For me some of my earliest memories of the internet were the sound of a modem handshaking with the ISP’s server. Visually I recall many cheesy animated gifs, such as under construction banners, buttons and arrows, bars and lines and many different welcome gifs. This page brings back some fond and sad memories. http://www.animatedgif.net/

Today I still see the web as a graphic intense delivery system which is now more sophisticated. The days of animated gifs has been replaced by flash and movies. No more do we see the personal homepage on an ISP’s free hosting or Geocites, Web 2.0 has taken over, the online community has changed.

I found bbc.co.uk is hosted in the UK and was 19hops from my machine.

Domain name:

bbc.co.uk

Registrant:

British Broadcasting Corporation

Registrant type:

UK Limited Company, (Company number: 000057)

Registrant's address:

Research & Development

Kingswood Warren

Tadworth

Surrey

KT20 6NP

United Kingdom

Registrar:

British Broadcasting Corporation [Tag = BBC]

Relevant dates:

Registered on: before Aug-1996

Renewal date: 13-Dec-2010

Last updated: 11-Nov-2008

Registration status:

Registered until renewal date.

Name servers:

ns1.bbc.co.uk 132.185.132.21

ns1.rbsov.bbc.co.uk 212.58.227.48

ns1.thdo.bbc.co.uk 212.58.224.21

ns1.thls.bbc.co.uk 132.185.240.21

WHOIS lookup made at 08:22:56 07-Sep-2009

Domain name speculation in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was very much like the Victorian gold rush. Many people spent large amounts of money buying domains and parking them for sale. There are plenty of companies out there that engage in deleted domain sales. It is also worth companies to buy the misspelling of their names, especially single transposition error spelling.

Notes

• The Internet is a giant network of computers
• The foundations of the Internet were to withstand a nuclear attack
• packet switching and TCP/IP is how data moves around the Internet
• SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
• FTP -  File Transfer Protocol
• NNTP – News Network Transfer Protocol
• IRC – Internet Relay Chat
• Vint Cerf -  The man behind TCP/IP
• A few places were involved in creating the Internet, mainly ARPANet

Currently we use IPv4 that has 2³² address soon they are going to implement IPv6 which has 2¹²⁸ addresses which makes it a 128 bit address.