Chapter 1
Brittany Ritsick
CIS 145 – SP24
10 February 2024
Module 1 Summary
The Internet has shaped the way I live my life. As a child, the Internet was not as fast or as easily accessible as it is today. With the rapid growth of the internet and me growing up along with it, I have been aware of most changes and advances as they have happened. While I have grown with the Internet and feel that it comes as second nature to me, there were still things I was excited to expand my knowledge on from this chapter. The most intriguing to me was to be able to decipher some of the language we see every day and understand the common acronyms and what they do.
For example, I have seen HTML a lot when accessing the Internet. I did not know that it stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and that it is a programming language used to format documents by using tags. While I did know that URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, it was new to me to learn each part of the URL. I had knowledge about the transfer protocol portion of the URL such as http and ftp, but I did not know about domain names or filenames. I had never taken the time to realize that each item you may click on a website such as a menu, is a hyperlink that leads to the next screen that appears, until reading Chapter 1 and others. Previously, I was under the assumption that all hyperlinks appeared with a blue line under them and appeared as a URL does.
When it comes to bookmarks and favorites, as well as back buttons and refresh buttons, these are all things I would consider to be general knowledge. Although, I will admit that could be a bias of mine coming from me growing up with the Internet. I have vivid memories of having to explain to my grandmother how to use her computer, and she never fully understood how to use the Internet. Until she got her first iPhone, now she believes she is a professional.
I also have a lot of knowledge when it comes to browsing history and cache and cookies, as it is the first thing we are told to go to when we are experiencing issues with the Intranet or VPN through my employer. Sometimes websites we need to access remotely start to prompt an error of “access not granted”, and we are directed to clear cache and cookies as one of our first steps to resolve the issue.
I have personally used private browsing mode, but not for the reasons one may think. For a while I was able to access my parent’s cable streaming account if I used my wireless data and a private browser. However, since companies like Netflix have caught on to account sharing, this trick no longer works for me. I have also done a lot of saving from webpages, as I grew up in the AIM days, where having the best word document as your profile picture was your number one goal. All in all, there were only a few new things I have learned from Chapter 1, but it was nice to reminisce on growing up along with the Internet and to refresh myself on some of the general knowledge of the Internet.