Downloading

Everyones favorite thing to do on the internet is to download. But what is downloading? Downloading is a document or file transferring from one computer to your computer. The opposite, uploading, is transferring information from your computer to another computer. Downloading was a craze in the late 90's with Napster. Napster shared music illegally by allowing users to upload musical content for others to share and download.

Domain Name

The second part of the url, for example www.yahoo.com is the domain name. The domain name in this case is yahoo.com. There can only be one yahoo.com but there are many differnet domains as well. Some include .com, .biz, .org, .edu, .gov, etc. The domain name usually represents the company name or the website you are going to. The .com or .edu represents what body of work it is. .com is for commercial business while .edu is for educational institutions.

Url?

When going to different websites we very rarely know what we actually are typing in to the computer. What does http mean? What about www? Well first of all you need to know that a url, or uniform resource locator, is a string of characters that indentifies an Internet resources type and location. It is much easier to remember www.yahoo.com then it is to remember the ip address for that site. Each site is given an IP address, or Internet Protocol address, a numerical id and address that is assigned to the computer network.