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Text 1
Cultural background notes
A
Brief History of the Internet and Related Networks
1. Introduction
In 1973, the U.S.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a research program
to investigate techniques and technologies for interlinking packet networks of
various kinds. The objective was to develop communication protocols which would
allow networked computers to communicate transparently across multiple, linked
packet networks. This was called the Internetting project and the system of
networks which emerged from the research was known as the "Internet."
The system of protocols which was developed over the course of this research
effort became known as the TCP/IP Protocol Suite, after the two initial
protocols developed: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol
(IP).
In 1986, the U.S.
National Science Foundation (NSF) initiated the development of the NSFNET which,
today, provides a major backbone communication service for the Internet. With
its 45 megabit per second facilities, the NSFNET carries on the order of 12
billion packets per month between the networks it links. The National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy
contributed additional backbone facilities in the form of the NSINET and ESNET
respectively. In Europe, major international backbones such as NORDUNET and
others provide connectivity to over one hundred thousand computers on a large
number of networks. Commercial network providers in the U.S. and Europe are
beginning to offer Internet backbone and access support on a competitive basis
to any interested parties.
"Regional"
support for the Internet is provided by various consortium networks and
"local" support is provided through each of the research and
educational institutions. Within the United States, much of this support has
come from the federal and state governments, but a considerable contribution has
been made by industry. In Europe and elsewhere, support arises from cooperative
international efforts and through national research organizations. During the
course of its evolution, particularly after 1989, the Internet system began to
integrate support for other protocol suites into its basic networking fabric.
The present emphasis in the system is on multiprotocol interworking, and in
particular, with the integration of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI)
protocols into the architecture.
Both
public domain and commercial implementations of the roughly 100 protocols of
TCP/IP protocol suite became available in the 1980's. During the early 1990's,
OSI protocol implementations also became available and, by the end of 1991, the
Internet has grown to include some 5 000 networks in over three dozen countries,
serving over 700 000 host computers used by over 4 000 000 people.
A
great deal of support for the Internet community has come from the U.S. Federal
Government, since the Internet was originally part of a federally-funded
research program and, subsequently, has become a major part of the U.S. research
infrastructure. During the late 1980's, however, the population of Internet
users and network constituents expanded internationally and began to include
commercial facilities. Indeed, the bulk of the system today is made up of
private networking facilities in educational and research institutions,
businesses and in government organizations across the globe.
The Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental Networks (CCIRN), which was
organized by the U.S. Federal Networking Council (FNC) and the European Reseaux
Associees pour la Recherche Europeenne (RARE), plays an important role in the
coordination of plans for government-sponsored research networking. CCIRN
efforts have been a stimulus for the support of international cooperation in the
Internet environment.
2. Internet
Technical Evolution
Over its history, the Internet has functioned as a collaboration
among cooperating parties. Certain key functions have been critical for its
operation, not the least of which is the specification of the protocols by which
the components of the system operate. These were originally developed in the DARPA research program mentioned above, but in the last five or six years, this
work has been undertaken on a wider basis with support from Government agencies
in many countries, industry and the academic community. The Internet Activities
Board (IAB) was created in 1983 to guide the evolution of the TCP/IP Protocol
Suite and to provide research advice to the Internet community.
During the course of its existence, the IAB has reorganized several times. It
now has two primary components: the Internet Engineering Task Force and the
Internet Research Task Force. The former has primary responsibility for further
evolution of the TCP/IP protocol suite, its standardization with the concurrence
of the IAB, and the integration of other protocols into Internet operation (e.g.
the Open Systems Interconnection protocols). The Internet Research Task Force
continues to organize and explore advanced concepts in networking under the
guidance of the Internet Activities Board and with support from various
government agencies.
A
secretariat has been created to manage the day-to-day function of the Internet
Activities Board and Internet Engineering Task Force. IETF meets three times a
year in plenary and its approximately 50 working groups convene at intermediate
times by electronic mail, teleconferencing and at face-to-face meetings. The IAB
meets quarterly face-to-face or by videoconference and at intervening times by
telephone, electronic mail and computer-mediated conferences.
Two other functions are critical to IAB operation: publication of documents
describing the Internet and the assignment and recording of various identifiers
needed for protocol operation. Throughout the development of the Internet, its
protocols and other aspects of its operation have been documented first in a
series of documents called Internet Experiment Notes and, later, in a series of
documents called Requests for Comment (RFCs). The latter were used initially to
document the protocols of the first packet switching network developed by DARPA,
the ARPANET, beginning in 1969, and have become the principal archive of
information about the Internet. At present, the publication function is provided
by an RFC editor.
The recording of identifiers is provided by the Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority (IANA) who has delegated one part of this responsibility to an
Internet Registry which acts as a central repository for Internet information
and which provides central allocation of network and autonomous system
identifiers, in some cases to subsidiary registries located in various
countries. The Internet Registry (IR) also provides central maintenance of the
Domain Name System (DNS) root database which points to subsidiary distributed
DNS servers replicated throughout the Internet. The DNS distributed database is
used, inter alia, to associate host and network names with their Internet
addresses and is critical to the operation of the higher level TCP/IP protocols
including electronic mail.
There are a number of Network Information Centers (NICs) located throughout the
Internet to serve its users with documentation, guidance, advice and assistance.
As the Internet continues to grow internationally, the need for high quality NIC
functions increases. Although the initial community of users of the Internet
were drawn from the ranks of computer science and engineering, its users now
comprise a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, arts, letters, business,
military and government administration.
3. Related
Networks
In
1980-1981, two other networking projects, BITNET and CSNET, were initiated. BITNET
adopted the IBM RSCS protocol suite and featured direct leased line connections
between participating sites. Most of the original BITNET connections linked IBM
mainframes in university data centers. This rapidly changed as protocol
implementations became available for other machines. From the beginning, BITNET
has been multi-disciplinary in nature with users in all academic areas. It has
also provided a number of unique services to its users (e.g., LISTSERV). Today,
BITNET and its parallel networks in other parts of the world (e.g., EARN in
Europe) have several thousand participating sites. In recent years, BITNET has
established a backbone which uses the TCP/IP protocols with RSCS-based
applications running above TCP.
CSNET was initially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to provide
networking for university, industry and government computer science research
groups. CSNET used the Phonenet MMDF protocol for telephone-based electronic
mail relaying and, in addition, pioneered the first use of TCP/IP over X.25
using commercial public data networks. The CSNET name server provided an early
example of a white pages directory service and this software is still in use at
numerous sites. At its peak, CSNET had approximately 200 participating sites and
international connections to approximately fifteen countries.
In
1987, BITNET and CSNET merged to form the Corporation for Research and
Educational Networking (CREN). In the Fall of 1991, CSNET service was
discontinued having fulfilled its important early role in the provision of
academic networking service. A key feature of CREN is that its operational costs
are fully met through dues paid by its member organizations.
Language notes
1. You may even have used it yourself,
perhaps at home or at school.
(很可能，你在家里或学校里已经亲自用过它。)
may/might have done表示对过去的推测，如语气更加肯定，可用must have done。
e.g. He may have already moved to another city since no one answered the phone
yesterday.
The writer must have been a pessimist at that time, because most stories he
wrote in that period end tragically.
2. If someone on the network, using another
computer, wants to use one of the files on the server, his or her computer would
retrieve that file from the server.
(使用网络系统的人，如果想使用服务器上的某个文件，可以通过自己的电脑把所需文件从服务器上调出来。)
Retrieve means to find or get something again.
3. Exploring the Web is real fun, and
it could not be simpler.
(探索万维网极其有趣而又非常简单。)
can/could not + 比较级有时表示肯定的意思，译为“非常…”“再…也不过了”
e.g. I can not agree more.
The ideas are original and the language is beautiful. Your essay can't be any better.
4. If you know what you want, then this
is a very handy way to order goods without having to visit a shop, although
there will always be those who prefer to see and touch something in "real
life" before buying it.
(如果你知道自己想买什么，那么这会是一种无需跑商店、极为便利的购物方式，尽管总有些人还是愿意在买东西前先看看、摸摸，真切地感受一下商品。)
Handy means convenient or useful.
5. The Internet helps ordinary people
to get in touch with others in a way that would never have been thought possible
even fifty years ago.
(国际互联网帮助普通大众互相联系，而这种联系方式是50年前的人们想都想不到的。)
注意句中的would never have been thought 是对过去的虚拟。
Text 2
Cultural background notes
Netiquette
Netiquette is nothing more than etiquette for the net. It first appeared in 1986
and attempted to set out the rules of acceptable behavior. There are plenty of
netiquette sites to be found via Yahoo and they all read a bit like advice columns in the pages of the
more staid women's magazines. Still, some of the tips are not immediately
obvious:
· Don't SHOUT (by using capitals)
· If you *must* emphasize, use asterisks (but we don't like preachers!)
· If you want to show emotion, use an 'emotion' to laugh :-) or frown :-(, or
joke ;-)
· Don't spew (repeat your opinion ad nauseam, usually to people who don't want to
listen)
· Don't blather (go on, and on and on… a screen, at the most two, should really
be the limit)
· And be moderate in your opinions, or you might be guilty of FLAMING.
To flame is to express an
immoderate opinion and it can easily lead to flame-wars... which degenerate into
a slanging-match, much to the disgruntlement of other readers of the group. And
they have ways of getting even. You don't want to get bombed (have your private
e-mail address deluged by repeated messages until your box is full).
So it might maker sense to read one of those on-line manuals
after all.
Language notes
1. Imagine being able to send a letter
to someone, anywhere in the world, that included pictures and sounds as well
as written words, and not even have to put a stamp on it.
(试想一下，你甚至不用贴邮票，就能把一封图文并茂、有声有色的信件寄到世界任何地方。)
Note imagine can be followed by nouns or the -ing forms of verbs.
e.g. She imagined opening the door and seeing her son standing right there.
Have your ever imagined his/him telling lies?
2. You can even attach a file from
your computer, whether it be a sound, an image or a text, to your e-mail message.
(你还可以附上计算机上的一个文件作为你的电子邮件信息，而这个文件可以是一段声音、一个图像，也可以是一篇文章。)
有时条件—让步状语从句用“be”替代is 或are，有时也可去掉状语连接词，而用倒装。
e.g. Everything in this world will sooner or later meet its death, be it a tree,
a bird or a man.
Home is home, be it ever so homely.
Be he friend or enemy, I'd never want to see him.
3. Just as you need to put the correct
address on an envelope to make sure it gets to the right place, so you must
also put the correct e-mail address on your electronic correspondence.
(要把正确的地址写在信封上才能确保信被收到。同样，你必须把正确的收件人地址写在电子邮件上。)
"as＋从句＋so＋从句"结构表示“像……一样”，“正如……”。
e.g. As trees need water for growth, so human hearts need kindness to stay healthy.
4. E-mail has obvious advantages for
schools and businesses that want to keep track of their messages.
(对于学校和商业界来说，电子邮件有着显著的优势——它可以帮助它们跟踪信息。)
Keep track of means to keep informed of something, c.f. lose track of
something.
5. It is the Internet equivalent of
shouting down the telephone.
（在网络世界中，这就相当于在电话里大吼大叫。）
Equivalent means something equal or similar in value, amount or significance.
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