Short for Internet Relay Chat, IRC is an Internet service that allows users from all over the world to chat in real time. Users can join existing "channels" (or conversations) or they can create their own.

This is a compression standard for graphic files developed by the Joint Photographic Experts Group.

This is the term for entering your account on a computer system. You usually need a password and a user I.D. to do this successfully.

This is short for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. If your e-mail program has MIME capabilities, it will allow you to send and receive messages which contain non-ASCII files like video or sound clips.

Your modem is your friend. A master translator, it sits between your computer and your phone jack -- spinning digital data into analog gold (so that data can move through your phone line) and vice versa.

In an e-mail address or URL, a .net suffix denotes that the address is part of a company or agency that provides network resources to the Internet.

Part of the Usenet naming hierarchy, newsgroups starting with this prefix discuss network news -- not current events.