WHY DO I NEED TO KNOW THIS?
If you are starting a business in a new town or city, it’s a good idea to know some of the history of the town, how it’s laid out, how the utilities work, how to find your way around the area, etc. It’s the same with the Internet.
If you have only visited the area before, you don’t really know the infrastructure that may be vital to your business interests.
Here you’ll find some background on the Internet and how it interacts with your online business.
Ecommerce & The Internet Articles
The main way to prevent email worms or viruses from entering your computer is DON’T OPEN EMAIL ATTACHMENTS!
When email arrives for you it is stored on an email server. To access your mail you must either go to the server and read it there or download it to your computer using an email client.
When surfing the web, you may want to save or download items you come across. You can right-click your mouse and select File/Save As… from the context menu
Adding plug-ins (called Add-ons in IE) expands the capabilities of browsers to play other types of files besides HTML. Some allow files such audio and video to play within the browser (embedded), some direct the files to a separate player on your computer.
If you want to type a letter, look at a picture and listen to music on your home computer, you have to open three separate programs. What a web browser does is allow all sorts of file types to be displayed via one program.
In order for homes and businesses to connect to the Internet they need an ISP the same way you need a phone company to connect to the telephone system. There are essentially two types of ISP’s; direct connect and portals.
Homes and small offices use the two most common ways to access the Internet, dial-up and broadband. A Modem (Modulator-DEModulator) connects your computer to the incoming signal, whether it’s a phone line or cable.
Now that we know the address we need a common format, or protocol, to communicate. TCP/IP - Transport Control Protocol/Internet Protocol is what your computer uses to communicate with the outside world, whether the Internet or other computers on a local network.
The basic structure of the Internet is similar to the highway system. Interstate highways are equivalent to Internet backbones which are high capacity fiber-optic cables.
