The Internet is the connection of several different computers around the world.

Individuals / Organizations can communicate, access information, conduct market research, advertise, take and place orders, provide customer support, test new products, talk in real time, contact branches of the company around the world and perform other tasks in a simple, sure, efficient & cost effective manner from an office cabin or even one's bedroom.

People want to be on the Net simply for the freedom it offers. There is no 'Internet Inc.' There are no official censors, no bosses, no board of directors, and no stockholders. The Internet, as a whole, unlike the phone system, doesn't charge for long-distance service and it doesn't charge for access time either. The Internet keeps changing constantly and hence, there is always something new for people when they log-in every day. As Winston Churchill once said "To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often."

The Internet, today, has become a means of inexpensive communication to millions of people around the world. There already are more than 40 million Internet users and the number of users are increasing at a rate of 10% a month. The Internet has also become a powerful medium for corporates to expand their businesses globally by advertising their products and even receiving product orders and feedback from their customers.

ISP's (Internet Service Providers) provide Internet connections to subscribers and manage their mailing and other requirements. The pre-requisites for a subscriber are: a computer, a modem and a telephone line. In India. VSNL is the only ISP permitted to provide Internet Services.

Electronic Mail (E-mail) is the most prevalent application of computer networking. It allows people to communicate instantly & cheaply. E-mail address is hinged around the concept of postal address. This address provides all the information required to get the message across via the Internet to the person concerned.

The World Wide Web is an information system that links data from a variety: of Internet Servers under one set of protocols called HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) The advantage is that it provides users with a friendly point & click interface This allows them easy access to a wide variety, of information (text. graphics. sound, movies, etc.).

A browser is a software program on one's computer, which is used to access the W\VW and fetch documents from various sources. Examples of browsers are: Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The URL is the web address and a website can be accessed using the same URL from anywhere in the world. Computer Wizards URL is: http://www. compwizards.com

Due to the phenomenal growth of the Web, it became very difficult to locate information. Thus, in order to access information easily, search engines were developed A Search Engine is a database which is used to store information about Web Sites and can be used to locate, with ease, the addresses of the desired Web Site. It is similar to the yellow pages and contains the URL's of all the sites (similar to the index Card box in the library,') which have registered with it. Some of the popular international Search Engines are Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek, Alta Vista and Hot Bot.