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The Internet can best be described as network of data networks with millions of users -- spanning the entire globe. Opera accesses the Internet using the <A HREF="#www">World Wide Web</A> (WWW) to retrieve information.
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Having its origin in the military, the Net is now undergoing fundamental changes. Business has discovered it as a medium to transfer information quickly and cost-effectively. But as an inherently one-to-one communication medium, it also holds enormous potential for marketing in companies big or small.
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The Internet is linked via satellite and undersea cables. The "host" or "server", the core of individual networks, usually carries all the information of the "clients", and make them available to anyone in the world who is "online". This allows the "clients" to be "offline", means their information is still accessible from the "server".
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Picture it as your right hand as the server, and your fingers as individual clients; the body is the world, and your other hand or foot is just another server. But now you don't only have two hands and two feet, but thousands of them, each one with hundreds or thousands of fingers and toes. And if one foot is bathing, means temporarily "offline", others will ensure that information crossing the body is still delivered via another route until the server is up again. This is the Internet - big, fast, flexible.
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The World Wide Web is an information system that makes it possible to navigate through the Internet in a simple fashion by clicking on what are known as 'links'. You can access documents, files, programs and applications via the WWW - or short: "web'.
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Lately, technology has made it possible to also 'stream' information to your PC. This means you no longer have to download the complete file and play/run it on your side, but you get streamed information. In practice, this means you can listen to the first 20 seconds of a, say RealAudio file, and then abort the transfer whenever you like.
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Email is probably the most versatile and effective element of modern communications technology. It allows you to communicate with friends, relatives or like-minded souls quickly and cost-effectively.
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Opera has support for sending electronic mail messages. Before you can send messages from Opera, you must specify your name, the machine you will use to send mail (mail server), and finally your mail address. The address must be in the format
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name@address.country
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ie. SMTP format.
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Note: You can ask your system administrator or Internet supplier for the name of your mail server.
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If you already have a mail program you can use this with Opera. Specify this program instead of your name, mail server and mail address.
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<B>To set up mail preferences:</B>
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Choose 'Mail...' from the 'Preferences' menu.
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Fill in the fields for name, mail address and mail server or fill in the name of your own mail program.
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Click on the 'OK' button.
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You can also specify a file where Opera saves all outgoing mails, provided you use Opera for mailing rather than your own email client.
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TIP: If you use Pegasus Mail, you can use the commandline option -T %1 to tell Opera to open a new message window in Pegasus with the email address pasted into the To: field when you click on a mailto: link on a web page.
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USENET or newsgroups is a 'place' in cyberspace where people with common interests share discussion forums. Anything from the absurd to the bizarre, from politics to computers, from hobbies to interests, from the present to the future is being discussed. There are currently more than 20.000 individual newsgroups listed. Have your pick, and take part in inter-continental communication. Subscription is free in most cases. Please refer to the group:
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<BLOCKQUOTE>news.announce.newusers</BLOCKQUOTE>
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for details on how to conduct in the news- or discussion forums.
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Technical questions relating to Opera and other browsers are discussed under
In Opera it is possible to read so-called discussion or news groups. In order to do this you must tell Opera where to find these groups, ie. the name of a News server. You can get this name from your System Administrator or Internet supplier.
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Opera is a programme which provides access to the World Wide Web World_Wide_Web(WWW). WWW uses a type of address known as Universal Resource Locator (URL). These are some examples of URLs:
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http://www.operasoftware.com/index.html
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ftp://argo-navis.com/pub/ftp.nta.no/
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news:no.marked
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Usually a URL consists of the following sections:
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protocol://machine-name/directory/filename
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but in some cases particular sections can be omitted.
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A protocol states how a document shall be retrieved, and what type of document it is. Opera supports the following protocols:
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<B>HTTP</B> - HyperText Transfer Protocol. This is the most common protocol and is used for retrieving normal documents on the Web.
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<B>FTP</B> - File Transfer Protocol. This is used for retrieving simple documents, files and programmes from so-called FTP (FTP-file-stores).
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<B>Gopher</B> - This is used for searching for files. -
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<B>WAIS</B> - Wide Area Information Server..
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<B>News</B> - This is used for reading newsgroups (discussion groups).
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<B>Mailto</B> - This is used for sending electronic mail.
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<A NAME="links"><FONT SIZE="5">Links</FONT></A>
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Links can usually be seen as differently coloured text, eg.red. But links can also be graphics, and these have an extra border round them, which is usually red. The colour can be selected in the 'Preferences' menu, under '<A HREF="prefmenu.htm#links">Link Presentation</A>'. When you click on a link, you retrieve the document the link points to.
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You can now also save files that are links, like .MIDI files. This is being done via the right-click menu.
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Winsock is a programme library, which is used for communications. Opera is dependent on this library for retrieving information from the Internet.
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A Name server is like a telephone directory. Give it a name/address and it finds the corresponding number.
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In practice, if you enter a URL (uniform resource locator) like http://www.operasoftware.com, the name server will look up the IP (Internet Protocol) address relating to that URL. In this case it's 209.100.52.40. This will tell the server to look up Opera Software's server and retrieve its documents.
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<A NAME="mime"><FONT SIZE="5">MIME</FONT></A>
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The MIME protocol is a method for declaring document types. It is used when sending mail over the Internet or World Wide Web. When Opera retrieves a document it checks the document type and whether it can display it. If Opera does not know how to display it, the user is asked to decide what should happen - whether it should be saved or displayed with another programme.
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<A NAME="htm"><FONT SIZE="5">HTML</FONT></A>
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HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language is a readable document format which is used on the World Wide Web.
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An example of HTML is shown below:
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
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<HTML>
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<TITLE>Welcome to our home page</TITLE>
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<META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Arachnophilia Version 2.5">
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<META NAME="FORMATTER" CONTENT="Arachnophilia Version 2.5">
As you can see, HTML is a markup language, governed by tags in brackets < >. This makes it easy to write HTML documents, but the newer word processors and HTML editors take the pain out of writing HTML code manually.
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<A NAME="tcpip"><FONT SIZE="5">TCP/IP</FONT></A>
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<B>TCP</B> (Transmission Control Protocol) is the protocol that defines how to transmit data and reliably deliver them, or detect and recover from a failure.
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<B>IP</B> is the Internet Protocol, defining how to transmit a chunk of data from one computer to another via a number of connected networks.
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TCP breaks up the message it will send into smaller packets, which IP then gets to its destination, and the remote TCP then reconstructs the message and delivers it, or handles any problems before it can deliver the message to the receiver.
