| ISP Once
upon a time, you could only connect to the Internet if you belonged to a
major university or had a note from the Pentagon. Not anymore: ISPs have
arrived to act as your (ideally) user-friendly front end to all that the
Internet offers. Most ISPs have a network of servers (mail, news, Web, and
the like), routers, and modems attached to a permanent, high-speed
Internet "backbone" connection. Subscribers can then dial into the local
network to gain Internet access--without having to maintain servers, file
for domain names, or learn Unix. |