On Tue, 11 Apr 2000, you wrote:
> Stephen,
>
> Mea Culpa! I plead total ignorance to geek terminology. My ISP
> frequently uses the term IP to mean internet provider. If perchance IP
> refers to a different technolory then I would of course be interested to
> know what it does mean.
>
IP==Internet Protocol
The following was swiped from http://whatis.com
IP (Internet Protocol)
The Internet Protocol (IP) is the method or protocol by which data is sent from one
computer to another on the Internet. Each computer (known as a host) on the
Internet has at least one address that uniquely identifies it from all other computers
on the Internet. When you send or receive data (for example, an e-mail note or a
Web page), the message gets divided into little chunks called packets. Each of these
packets contains both the sender's Internet address and the receiver's address. Any
packet is sent first to a gateway computer that understands a small part of the
Internet. The gateway computer reads the destination address and forwards the packet
to an adjacent
gateway that in turn reads the destination address and so forth across the Internet
until one gateway
recognizes the packet as belonging to a computer within its immediate neighborhood or
domain. That
gateway then forwards the packet directly to the computer whose address is specified.
Because a message is divided into a number of packets, each packet can, if necessary,
be sent by a
different route across the Internet. Packets can arrive in a different order than the
order they were sent
in. The Internet Protocol just delivers them. It's up to another protocol, the
Transmission Control
Protocol (TCP) to put them back in the right order.
IP is a connectionless protocol, which means that there is no established connection
between the end
points that are communicating. Each packet that travels through the Internet is
treated as an
independent unit of data without any relation to any other unit of data. (The reason
the packets do get
put in the right order is because of TCP, the connection-oriented protocol that keeps
track of the
packet sequence in a message.) In the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) communication
model, IP
is in layer 3, the Networking Layer.
The most widely used version of IP today is Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4).
However, IP Version 6
(IPv6) is also beginning to be supported. IPv6 provides for much longer addresses and
therefore for the
possibility of many more Internet users. IPv6 includes the capabilities of IPv4 and
any server that can
support IPv6 packets can also support IPv4 packets.
