6. Do you pay for your web hosting a year in advance? No, I pay .

a) by a month b) monthly

7. Many web hosting companies offer free name registration when you

buy a hosting plan.

a) domain b) internet

8. I built my web sites with the provided by my web host.

a) tools b) utensils

9. Could you tell me more about the different types of hosting that you

offer?

a) plants b) plans

10. Is your web host ? No, it’s very expensive!

1. low price b) affordable

Key: 1 b; 2a; 3b; 4b; 5a; 6b; 7a; 8a; 9b; 10b.

2. Listening

Listen to a piece of information and answer the following questions:

1. What is BASIC?

2. What century was it written?

3. Who was it written for?

4. When did BASIC get its popularity?

BASIC (standing for Beginner’s All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was written (invented) in 1963, at Dartmouth College, by mathematicians John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtzas as a teaching tool for undergradu­ates. BASIC has been one of the most commonly used computer program­ming languages, a simple computer language considered an easy step for students to learn before more powerful languages such as FORTRAN.

BASIC’s popularity was spread by both Paul Allen and William Gates, in 1975. Gates and Allen (both Microsoft founding fathers) wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair personal computer. It was the first product Microsoft sold. Later Gates and Microsoft wrote versions of BASIC for the Apple compu­ter, and IBM’s DOS which Gates provided came with its’ version of BASIC.

3. Reading

• Work in pairs.

Cut out and shuffle the parts of two pieces of information. Students in pairs have to sort out the cards to make the information about the history of the internet and the history of email complete.

THE HISTORY OF THE INTERNET

Before there was the public internet there was the internet’s forerunner ARPAn­et or Advanced Research Projects Agency Networks

ARPAnet was funded by the United States military after the cold war with the aim of having a military command and control center that could withstand nu­clear attack. The point was to distribute information between geographically dispersed computers

ARPAnet created the TCP/IP communications standard, which defines data transfer on the Internet today. The ARPAnet opened in 1969 and was quickly usurped by civilian computer nerds who had now found a way to share the few great computers that existed at that time

Tim Berners-Lee was the man leading the development of the World Wide Web (with help of course), the defining of HTML (hypertext markup language) used to create web pages, HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators)

All of those developments took place between 1989 and 1991.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England

and graduated in Physics from Oxford University in 1976. He is currently the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the group that sets technical standards for the Web

Besides Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf is also named as an internet daddy. Ten years out of high school, Vinton Cerf begun co-designing and co-developing the protocols and structure of what became the Internet

HISTORY OF EMAIL

Computer engineer, Ray Tomlinson invented internet based email in late 1971. Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network (1971). Ray Tomlinson

worked as a computer engineer for Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), the company hired by the United States Defense Department to build the first Internet in 1968 Ray Tomlinson was experimenting with a popular program he wrote called SNDMSG that the ARPANET programmers and researchers were using on the network computers (Digital PDP-10s) to leave messages for each other. SNDMSG was a “local” electronic message program

You could only leave messages on the computer that you were using for other persons using that computer to read. Tomlinson used

a file transfer protocol that he was working on called CYPNET to adapt the SNDMSG program so it could send electronic messages to any computer on the ARPANET network

Ray Tomlinson chose the @ symbol to tell which user was “at” what computer. The @ goes in between the user’s login name and the name of his/her host computer The first email was sent between two computers that were actually sitting besides each other. However, the ARPANET network was used as the connection between the two. The first email message was “QWERTYUIOP”