Disney Online

What is the Internet?

The Internet is simply thousands of computers all connected together in one big, world-wide network. Our computers at home are linked to this network by an Internet Service Provider – a company that allows us to dial into its own computers, usually via our telephone lines.

A number of different services are based on the Internet.

•	The World Wide Web consists of many millions of pages written using a special computer code called HTML. Software programs on our computers, called 'browsers', read this code and convert it into pages that we can see. These pages feature text, graphics, animation and sound.
•	E-mail is sent from computer to computer over the Internet.
•	Newsgroups are online discussion groups where messages relating to specific subjects can be posted. People who sign up to the newsgroup can read the messages and post a response.
•	Chat. Real time chat is very popular with kids, and some web sites feature chat rooms, which are areas users can enter using a nickname and have live text conversations with each other.
•	There are lots of other services using the Internet, but these are the ones we are most likely to come into contact with. As the Internet grows, more and more services will be added.