Click: Press your mouse button until you hear the slight clicking sound. The sound indicates that you have sent a signal to the program.

Clipboard: A temporary staging area for cut or copied information. The clipboard holds the information until you cut or copy another selection to it or you exit from MS Windows.

Cursor: The cursor can be either an arrow, a hand, a vertical bar, an hourglass, or some other symbol. The arrow represents places where you can click your mouse. The hand points to a green link where you can click to jump to new information. The vertical bar represents a place where you provide input from the keyboard. If material may be inserted or replaced, it will be inserted or replaced from this point. If you may select material, the selection will start from this point.
The hourglass is shown a program is working on the function that you have selected. It tells you that, even though the screen may not have changed, your request has been recognized and is being processed.

Double-click: Press your mouse button twice quickly, until you hear the mouse click twice.

FAQs: Frequently Asked Questions (and their answers) are documents written to explain aspects of the net. Some of the more generally useful FAQs are posted periodically to the newsgroup news.announce.newusers. Read them using the Read Usenet News function. There is a World Wide Web page that uses hypertext to display the USENET FAQs. You can read that page via the Web at:

Hotspots: Hotspots are the places in a Web document that are the entry points linking a page to another page via URLs. Hotspots look different than other words or pictures on a Web page. They may be a different color, be followed by a bracketed number, or be underlined. Their appearance differs based on the client being used. You click on the hotspot or enter the number of the hotspot to invoke the link.

Hypermedia and Hypertext: Hypertext is text which points to other text and allows you to jump around in the text without necessarily reading it in a specific order. Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext. It allows graphical and audio representations of links as well. If you select a link, hypertext and/or hypermedia will transfer you to the page represented by the link.

Internet Protocol (or IP) Address: is a set of numbers that expresses the exact connection between a computer and the network on the Internet. IP addresses have four sets of numbers (octets) separated by periods or dots. These combined parts are unique on the network and allow the network to know specifically which computer is to receive which electronic packet as well as specifically from which computer the electronic packet came.

Flames: Flame is the network name for screaming at someone using either news or lists. It is very easy for people to quickly and thoughtlessly respond to a news or list posting. It is particularly easy for people who have been using the net for a long time to flame at the new user who asks a question to which everyone knows the answer. Some flames will be very vituperative and scurrilous. This kind of behavior is discouraged. Some people will enter something like flame on to indicate that they are responding emotionally to a particular topic. Emotional responses are not discouraged, but attacks on people rather than ideas will in turn incur flames from others. These flame wars can be unpleasant or can turn from a misunderstanding into a new understanding shared by the group. Flames can therefore be an interesting group process.

Network Connection: A network connection is the point at which a host computer is connected to a network. The point can be at an individual workstation or at a connection of one network with another network.

Nickname: Your nickname is the name that you choose when you connect to an IRC server. It can be any combination of alphanumeric and special characters that you find on the keyboard (not including the function keys, of course). Many users choose descriptive nicknames like sleepy or top1.

Ping: is the TCP/IP service that allows you to test to see if you can reach another network node from your local host. Simply, ping sends a specific message to a remote host on the network to see if the host will respond. The command will also return the time in milliseconds that a packet takes to make the round trip from your local host to the remote host. The ping command is used in diagnosing network problems and is also used by networking technical people to describe trying to reach their friends and co-workers on the network.  does not have a Ping client yet, so if you want to use Ping, you will need to be connected to a system that offers this service. There is a PING command available within IRC, this is returned in seconds.

Port: A port is rather like a transmission channel on a radio. It is the place at which the application on the remote or host computer "listens" for connection requests to a particular application. Gopher usually uses port 70. Telnet usually uses port 23. Services can use other port numbers to direct connections to specific applications. If you are given a specific port number, place the number in the port number dialog box before connecting to the remote host.

Protocol: Internet usage defines protocol as the formal description of the message formats and rules used by computers to exchange information. These formats and rules may be those at the level where bits and bytes go onto the wire or those between applications such as file transfer.

Remote Computer: Any computer that is not the computer you are using is considered remote. The distance between the connected computers is not relevant in the definition. Also known as hosts or servers.

TCP/IP: TCP/IP is the abbreviation which represents Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. All together the suite (group) of protocols (standards) represent the rules by which all the connected networks agree to talk with each other.

Signature: A signature or signature file is a short message that is appended to the end of electronic mail and/or USENET postings. A signature should contain any information that you would like others to have in order to contact you. People usually include their full names, some sort of postal contact information, possibly some telephone contact information, some corporate identification, if appropriate, and the appropriate Email address information. Some people also add quotations, jokes, cute sayings, and/or pictures to their signatures. It is considered good manners to keep your signature to four lines or less in consideration of people with slow-speed connections or people who are paying fees based on size of transmissions received. Some word processors store extra control codes in their files (to indicate special operations), so make sure you use the special method provided by your word processor to save these files as pure DOS (ASCII) text. Of course, if you use Notepad to create these files, they will automatically be in ASCII

Scroll bar: Scroll bars are located at the right and bottom edges of the display window. Scroll bars are displayed automatically whenever the information to be presented exceeds the size of the window. To hide scroll bars, you can resize the window, or you can make the display area larger by hiding the toolbar or status display. Dialog and command boxes may also contain scroll bars. To see the complete list of choices, click on the arrow displayed at the far right of the dialog box. You can then scroll among the choices. Scroll bars contain markers, called scroll boxes, that indicate your vertical and horizontal location within a display. You can use your mouse or your keyboard to scroll to other parts of the document.

URL: URLs are the resource locators used by the World Wide Web as explicit addresses for information. They contain an access method/resource type (file, or gopher, or http, for example); a host name; perhaps a TCP/IP port number; and may contain a directory/file path. These explicit strings are used by the Web traversing programs to connect the user directly to a particular document or page.

Other examples of URLs:

file://ftp.yoda.edu/pub/doc/file.txt or
ftp://ftp.yoda.edu/pub/doc/file.txt to describe a specific file of text
file://ftp.empire.mil/pub to describe a specific directory
gopher://swamp.dagoba.edu:1234 to describe how to get to a gopher using a specific port number

VT100 Terminal: The VT100 is the "standard" ASCII text terminal for which applications are designed. Originally manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), this terminal has a monochrome screen and attached enterboard. As you connect to services across the Internet via telnet, you will frequently be asked what terminal your client is emulating. Choose VT100.