Features of The Internet:

The Internet offers access to the same Information and services that have been available through online information services plus much more. For many people, the Internet has included the functions on libraries, telephones, televisions, catalogs, and that's just a sample of its capabilities.

The World Wide Web is getting all the headlines, but for many people the main attraction of the Internet is electronic mail. There are millions of users of e-mail in the world. E-mail is clearly superior to paper mail for so many purposes that most people who try it can't imagine going back to working without it. E-mail occupies a psychological space all its own, it almost as immediate as phone call, but if you need to, you can think about what you are going to
say and reply when it's convenient.

E-mail, or electronic mail, links computers by wired or wireless connections and allows users, via electronic mailboxes, to send 'and receive messages.

E-mail has both advantages and disadvantages like voice mail, it helps people avoid playing phone tag or coping with paper and stamps. A message can be as simple as a birthday greeting or as complex and lengthy as a report with supporting documents (including attached text, graphic, video and/or sound flies). It can be quicker than a fax message and more organized than a voice-mail message. By reading the list of senders and topics displayed on the screen you can quickly decide which messages are important, Also e-mail software automatically creates an archive of all sent and received messages. Sending an e-mail message usually costs as little as a local phone call or less but it can go across many time zones and be read at any time. Some e-mail messages are now received as voice mail and read aloud to the recipient.

However there are some problems; You might have to sort through a large number of messages every day, a form of junk mail brought about by the ease with which anyone can send duplicate copies of a message to many people. Mail that travels via the Internet often takes a circuitous route, bouncing around various computers in the country in an effort to-find the fastest and most efficient route. Although a lot of messages may go through in a minute's time, others may be hung up because of system overload, taking hours and even days. Finally, if users let their e-mail messages pile up; they may ultimately fill up their allocated space on the server that is storing them (though some systems automatically delete stored messages after a period of time).

One of the Internet's most interesting features goes under the name Usenet, short for "user network", which is essentially a giant, dispersed bulletin board. Usenet newsgroups are electronic discussion groups that focus on a specific topic, the equivalent of AOL's (America Online) or CompuServe's "forums". They are one of the most lively and heavily trafficked areas of the Net.

Usenet users exchange e-mail and messages ("news"). Users post questions, answers, general information, and FAQ files on Usenet. The flow of messages, or articles, is extraordinary, and you can get easily hooked. There are more than 15,000 Usenet newsgroup forums and they cover hundreds of topics.

Combining e-mail and newsgroups, mailing lists called listservs, allows anyone to subscribe (generally free) to an e-mail mailing list on a particular subject or subjects and post messages. The mailing-list sponsor then sends those messages to everyone else on that list. Thus, newsgroup listserv messages appear automatically, in your mailbox; you do not have to make the effort of accessing the newsgroup. As a result, it necessary to download and delete mail almost every day, or your mailbox will quickly become full. There are more than 3000 electronic mailing-list discussion groups.

File Transfer Protocol- a common method of moving files between two Internet sites. FTP connects you to a remote computer called an FTP site and transfer publicly available files to your own microcomputer's hard disk.

The free file offered cover nearly anything that can be stored on a computer: software, games, photos, maps, art, music, books, and statistics. You should be sure to scan all downloaded files and programs for viruses before, opening them. Some 2000-plus FTP sites (so called anonymous FTP sites) are open to anyone while others can access only by knowing a password. You can also use FTP to upload (transfer) your files to an FTP site.

Several tools exist to help filter through the amazing amount of  formation on the Internet, but one of the most important has been Gopher, which, like FTP, predates the Web. Gopher is a uniform system of menus, or series of lists, that allows users to easily browse and retrieve files stored, on different computers by making successive menu selections.

Why is it called "Gopher"?

Because the first gopher was developed at the home of the Golden Gophers, the University of Minnesota, and it helps you "go fer" the flies you seek, There is thousand of Gopher servers hooked up to the Internet "Gopherspace",

The commands and program used to login from one Internet site to another. The Telnet commands/programs gets you to the login prompt of another host.

This feature, which allows microcomputers to communicate successfully with mainframes, enables you to tap into Internet computers and access public files as though you were connected directly instead of, for example, through your ISP site. Although it is only a text base communication, the Telnet feature is especially useful for perusing large databases or library card catalogs. There are perhaps 1000 library catalogs accessible through the Internet, and a few thousand more Internet sites around the world have Telnet interfaces.

One last feature of the International remains to be discussed, perhaps, for most general users, the most important one: the World Wide Web.
The World Wide Web, or simply "the Web", consists of an interconnected system of sites, or servers, all over the world that can store information in multimedia form, sounds, photos, and video, as well as text. The sites share a form consisting of a hypertext series of links that connect similar words and phrases. Note two distinctive features:

• Multimedia form: Whereas Gopher and Telnet deal with text, the Web provides information in multimedia form graphics, video, and audio as well as text. You can still access Gopher, FTP, and the like through the Web, but the Web offers capabilities not offered by these more restricted pioneer Internet tools.
   
• Use of Hypertext: Whereas Gopher is a menu-based approach to accessing Net resources, the Web uses a hypertext format. Hypertext is a system in which documents scattered across many Internet sites and directly linked, so that a word or phrase in one document becomes a connection to a document in a different place

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