Today I attended the Infocomm Studies(IS) conducted by Mr Kent Cheong at HCI Computer Lab 1. I learned a whole range of stuff. Here I will list what I learned in this enriching lesson. First we learnt about the history about the Internet. It was originally started in 1969 to allow scientists from different locations to share information and to function if part of the network was disabled. The project name was ARPANET(Networking Project By Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency). It originally started in 1969 with four host modes but 15 years later, in 1984, it had more than 1000 host modes. Today, there are more than 200 million host modes! Indeed, technology rapidly improves. There are 3 ways to connect to the Internet- ISP, OSP and Wireless Internet Service Provider. I also learnt about the IP(Internet Protocol) address which is basically a number that is used to identify each computer or device on the Internet. Next, I learnt about the WWW(World Wide Web). It can be also called the Web for short. It is a global collection of electronic documents which can also be called web pages. Web pages can contain text, pictures, sounds, videos and also buit-in connections! There is also a URL(Uniform Resource Locator), which can be used to identify each and every web page. I also learnt about E-Commerce, or Electronic Commerce. It is business transaction that occurs over the Internet.There are also many different stuff on the WWW, which I will list down. Educational websites, Entertainment websites, Advocacy websites, and many more, like a personal website. A thumbnail is a smaller version of a larger picture, which can be used to improve web page display time. There is also a function called email on the WWW, which one can use to send messages to others. I also learnt about online netiqutte. There is basically only one rule, which is to treat others as you would like them to treat you. For example, do not send spam messages to somebody, as you would also not like it if someone else sent spam messages to you. Last but not least, we also learnt about Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is basically the writer of a certain website requiring to constantly update the website so as to attract readers. However, Web 2.0 enables both the writer and the readers to update the website. An example is the famous Wikipedia. From what I have just said above, it is obvious that technology constantly improves, day by day.
Roystan Ang
15/1/2010

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