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Glossary Internet

Glossary Internet

All technical terms of the article The History of the Internet in alphabetical order. The number at the end names the section that introduces the term.

A

  • Ajax – Technique of 2005 in which JavaScript fetches data from the server in the background and inserts it into the page without reloading; turned web pages into applications. 6
  • App – Program on a phone that talks to its maker’s server; replaced the browser for many purposes. 6
  • ARPANET – First packet network of the American research agency ARPA, in operation with four nodes from 1969, switched to TCP/IP in 1983, shut down in 1990. 2

B

  • Bit – Smallest unit of information, introduced by Shannon in 1948; speeds such as “50 megabits per second” count bits. 1
  • Blog – Weblog, a website with entries in chronological order, which from about 2000 made everyone a publisher. 6
  • Broadband – Permanent, fast connection over DSL, cable or fibre; replaced dial-up with the modem from 1999. 6
  • Browser – Program that fetches web pages by HTTP and displays HTML; the first were Berners-Lee’s WorldWideWeb (1990) and Mosaic (1993). 4

C

  • Certificate – Attestation signed by a trusted body that a key belongs to a name; identifies a server under HTTPS. 5
  • Circuit switching – Principle of the telephone network: a continuous line for the duration of a call, even while nobody speaks. 1
  • Cloud – Computers and storage that a provider rents out by the hour, from Amazon since 2006; the return of time-sharing on another scale. 6
  • Content delivery network – Network of caches in many data centres that keep copies of popular content close to the users. 6
  • CSS – Cascading Style Sheets (1996), language for type, colour and layout of a web page; separates appearance from content. 5

D

  • Datagram – Packet that runs through the network without any guarantee; order and completeness are ensured by the ends (Cyclades, 1972). 2
  • Digital Markets Act – EU regulation of 2022 that forbids the largest platforms to favour their own services and to lock users in. 7
  • Digital Services Act – EU regulation of 2022 that obliges large platforms to procedures against unlawful content, disclosure of their algorithms and audits. 7
  • Domain Name System (DNS) – Distributed, hierarchical database of 1983 that translates names such as stockter.info into IP addresses. 3
  • DSL – Digital Subscriber Line, data transmission over the copper line of the telephone in a frequency range above speech; in Germany from 1999. 6

E

  • Email – Message to a user’s mailbox on another computer, invented by Tomlinson in 1971, who chose the @ as separator. 2
  • Encapsulation – On sending, each layer puts the data of the layer above into its own envelope with a header; on receipt they are opened again. 3
  • End-to-end principle – Principle of 1984: the network carries packets and nothing else; what a service needs, the computers at the ends provide. 3
  • Ethernet – Technology of 1973 that attaches all computers of a building to a shared cable; connects computers within a building to this day. 2

F

  • FTP – File Transfer Protocol, transfer of files between computers, one of the first protocols of the ARPANET. 2

G

  • Gateway – Switching computer between two networks that reads only the IP envelope; today called a router. 3
  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – EU regulation of 2016, applicable since 25 May 2018; rights to access, erasure and objection, fines of up to four per cent of worldwide turnover. 7
  • Great Firewall – China’s system of filters at its exchange points, built since 1998, which blocks foreign services and searches traffic. 7

H

  • HTML – Hypertext Markup Language, the language of web pages: text with markup in angle brackets, above all for links. 4
  • HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol, with which a browser requests a document and a web server delivers it; versions 1.1 (1997), 2 (2015), 3 (2022). 4
  • HTTPS – HTTP over a connection encrypted with TLS; the norm since 2015. 5
  • Hypertext – Text made of pieces connected by links; word by Ted Nelson (1965), idea by Bush (1945), demonstration by Engelbart (1968). 4

I

  • ICANN – Non-profit corporation in California that has assigned endings, coordinated root servers and distributed address blocks since 1998; without US government oversight since 2016. 5
  • IETF – Internet Engineering Task Force, open assembly without membership that has written the rules of the Internet as RFCs since 1986. 3
  • IMP – Interface Message Processor, small switching computer at each ARPANET site to which the institute’s computer was attached. 2
  • Internet – Federation of networks over a common layer (IP); the word has stood in an RFC since 1974. 3
  • Internet service provider (ISP) – Firm that sells Internet access and exchanges its traffic with other providers at exchange points. 5
  • IP – Internet Protocol, knows only the envelope of a packet: sender, recipient, onward; promises no delivery. 3
  • IP address – Network-spanning address of a computer; in IPv4 32 bits as four numbers (203.0.113.7), in IPv6 128 bits in eight hexadecimal groups. 3
  • IPv6 – New version of the Internet Protocol of 1998 with 128-bit addresses, introduced gradually since the old addresses ran out in 2011. 6

J

  • JavaScript – Programming language in the browser (1995) with which a page responds to input without asking the server. 5

L

  • Layer model – Division of labour among the protocols: application, transport (TCP/UDP), Internet (IP), link (Ethernet, radio); each layer relies on the one below. 3
  • Let’s Encrypt – Non-profit certificate authority since 2015 that issues certificates free and automatically; made HTTPS the norm. 7

M

  • Modem – Device that turns bits into tones for the telephone line and back; from Bell in 1958, the usual access until about 2000. 1
  • Morris worm – Program of 2 November 1988 that spread through holes and paralysed about 6,000 of the 60,000 computers on the network; led to the founding of the CERT. 3
  • Mosaic – Browser of 1993 (NCSA), easy to install, with images in the text; made the web a mass medium. 4

N

  • Net neutrality – Principle that a provider treats all packets alike and neither slows nor favours any service; law in the EU since 2016. 7
  • NSFNET – Backbone of the American National Science Foundation from 1985, open to all universities, shut down in 1995. 3

P

  • Packet – Block of fixed size with a recipient address into which a message is cut; word by Donald Davies (1965). 2
  • Packet switching – Messages are cut into packets that find their own way individually and are reassembled at the destination; lines are shared rather than reserved. 2
  • PageRank – Method by Page and Brin (1998): a page is important if many important pages link to it; the basis of Google. 5
  • Peer-to-peer – Every computer is provider and customer at once, without a server in the middle (Napster 1999, BitTorrent 2001). 5
  • Protocol – Agreement down to the detail of how two computers exchange messages: start, acknowledgement, error case. 2

R

  • Resolver – Service, usually at the access provider, that queries the DNS chain for a computer and keeps results for a while. 3
  • RFC – Request for Comments, since 1969 the form of every document in which the rules of the Internet are written; more than 9,000. 2
  • Root server – Topmost server of the DNS, which knows only which servers are responsible for which ending. 3
  • Router – Switching computer that passes packets into the next network by their IP envelope; formerly gateway. 3

S

  • Search engine – Service that searches the full text of the web and ranks results (AltaVista 1995, Google 1998). 5
  • Social network – Service with an identity across pages and a stream of messages ordered by an algorithm (Facebook 2004, Twitter 2006). 6
  • Splinternet – Worry that the one network will become several that touch only at controlled crossings. 7
  • SSL – Secure Sockets Layer (1995), Netscape’s protocol for encrypting the connection between browser and server; predecessor of TLS. 5

T

  • TCP – Transmission Control Protocol, turns unreliable packets into a reliable connection: handshake, numbering, acknowledgement, retransmission. 3
  • Telnet – Login to a remote computer over the network, one of the first protocols of the ARPANET. 2
  • Time-sharing – One computer serves several people at terminals at once by switching between them in fractions of a second (around 1960). 1
  • TLS – Transport Layer Security, standard for encrypted connections since 1999, successor of SSL; version 1.3 of 2018. 5

U

  • UDP – User Datagram Protocol, lean alternative to TCP that sends packets without acknowledgement; for speech and video. 3
  • URL – Uniform Resource Locator, address of a document on the web made of scheme, host name and path. 4
  • Usenet – Worldwide system of discussion forums from 1979, at first over nightly telephone connections from computer to computer. 3

W

  • W3C – World Wide Web Consortium, founded by Berners-Lee in 1994, develops the standards of the web openly and without fees. 4
  • Web 2.0 – Term by Tim O’Reilly (2005): the web as a platform, content from the users, services that get better with the number of users. 6
  • Web server – Program that answers HTTP requests and delivers documents. 4
  • World Wide Web – System of linked documents over URL, HTML and HTTP, proposed by Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989; a service of the Internet, not the Internet. 4
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