PROGRAMMING FOR THE CONNECTED WORLD

When people first started connecting computers together in networks, a wide variety of proprietary protocols and hardware proliferated. Just because your computer had a network port, there was no guarantee you could connect to anything. Fortunately that era is gone. Instead, standardization for connection hardware and protocols has enabled the era of freely networked computers, which is just getting started.

Networks are classified into three groups according to the following definitions

• LAN (Local Area Network): Computers in a geographically small area such as a building, linked with high-speed connections.
• WAN (Wide Area Network): A network spread over a larger area, such as a factory or campus. Typically, a WAN provides connections between LANs using technology more suited to longer distance transmission.
• Internet: A network of networks, composed of a hierarchy of smaller networks including specialized backbone networks that move data between smaller networks.

The topic of networking is beyond the scope of this course. This lesson concentrates on interesting tasks you might do with a program to connect to the Internet.