Internet Protocols

October 30, 2007

The key protocols of the Internet are: News, Gopher, Telnet, Electronic Mail (e-mail), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), and HTTP (World Wide Web). These and others are integrated in the Uniform Resource Locator mechanism of the WWW.

News

The NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) protocol is used for distribution of news articles. One popular usage of NNTP is Network News (USENET) which also offers bulletin boards and chat rooms. There are newsgroups which can be accessed thought a special program on the Internet. We can “subscribe” to newsgroups and communicate through a system similar to e-mail. As with e-mail, Netnews is usually informal communication between several of individuals!

Gopher

Gopher is another tool used in Internet, which let you to browse for information without knowing where the information is located. Gopher is based on a browse from top-level menu to bottom level through “menus”. You navigate deeper and deeper in menus and when you reached the bottom level the information is displayed. All this has the benefit of being simple and easy to set up - the text files would need to be split down to the desired level of detail, and some description files would need to be set up.

The major disadvantage is the inflexibility of the static hierarchy. The user has to use judgment at each menu selection, as to which is the most likely item on the menu to contain the information required.

Telnet

Telnet provides a way to access remote a computer. You can interact through the remote computer with your keyboard, mouse or monitor and work on that computer as it you were an user on that computer. The remote computer is frequently called a host computer and you can use services on it even thought it is on the other side of the word.

Telnet is a user command using the underlying TCP/IP protocol for accessing remote computers. Being logged on the host computers means you have some privileges you may have been granted to the specific applications and data on that computer.

E-mail

One of the most popular service on the Internet is the electronic mail. The main features of this service are sending and receiving of electronics messages. To send an e-mail, you must know the recipient’s e-mail address. These addresses are composed of:

the user’s identification
followed by the “@” sign
followed by the location (domain name) of the recipient’s computer.

File Transfer Protocol

FTP allows to send and receive files to a remote computer. You can transfer many different types of files to your computer. Working on a server with a FTP Program you can update files stored on the computer. FTP is included in the suite of protocols that are part of TCP/IP, the client/server program that every Internet server and your PC or workstation uses.

HTTP (World Wide Web)

Underlying the user interface represented by web browsers, is the network and the protocols that travel the wires to the servers or “engines” that process requests, and return the various media. The protocol of the web is known as HTTP, for HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying mechanism on which CGI operates, and it directly determines what you can and cannot send or receive via CGI.