User:Dan Nessett/Sandboxes/Sandbox 1

The Internet is a term with many meanings, depending on the context of its use. To the general public, the term is often used synonymously with the World Wide Web, its best-known application. But the internet supports many other applications, such as electronic mail, streaming media, such as internet radio and video, a large percentage of telephone traffic, system monitoring and real-time control applications, to name a few. But in one respect the Internet is similar to an iceberg. The vast majority of it is out of sight. While distributed applications allow users to utilize internet services, their existence requires a vast plethora of technologies visible only to the enterprises that provide them. To service providers, the Internet identifies these underlying services. In addition, there are internet services that are accessible to the general public, while these same services are provided in restricted environments, such as those in an enterprise intranet, in military and government private internets and in local home networks. Further complicating the notion of an Internet is frequently public and private networks are connected in a way that allows them to interact in a limited way.

Web browsers are perhaps the most common user interface to the Internet. Web browsers translate human requests to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that actually moves the data between the browser and a Web server. The Internet itself has no direct human interfaces; every user-visible function must go through a program resident on a client or server computer. There are literally hundreds of different protocols, applications and services that run over the Internet. Virtual private networks interconnecting the parts of individual enterprises, or sets of cooperating enterprises, overlay the Internet. A wide range of interconnected networks using the same protocols as the public Internet, but isolated from it, provide services ranging from passing orders to launch nuclear weapons, authorizing credit card purchases, collecting intelligence information, controlling the electric power grid (see System Control And Data Acquisition), telemedicine such as transferring medical images and even allowing remote surgery, etc. ]]