Are you new to computers and the Internet? Here are some guidelines that might help.
TERMINOLOGY:
COMPUTER - the first one I ever saw was a little board with lights on it that you could play Tic-Tac-Toe with. You could tie it, but never win against it. Best Buy now has new computers for $300 and up, much more powerful than the ones that landed our first men on the moon.
SCREEN - the computer's "TV" screen, also called the Monitor
LAPTOP - a portable computer, flat and sassy
DESKTOP - usually a standing "tower" and separate "monitor"; but now they come in all configurations
KEYBOARD - the computer's "typewriter"
CURSOR - it's actually a two-part thing, a blinking vertical line that is the point of action on your screen, and a solid vertical line looking like the Roman numeral I --- you use the solid cursor to put the blinking cursor where you want to activate something on your screen; you move the solid cursor with your mouse
CLICK ON - use the MOUSE to move the CURSOR onto a HOTLINK, then press the left button at the top of the mouse, or the lower left corner of the pad -- it will "take you" to whatever the HOTLINK is connected to somewhere in the universe
LINK (or HOTLINK) - an active symbol or letters or pictures that "take you" to another place on the Internet or in your own computer
MOUSE - a palm-sized sliding thing that moves the CURSOR on your screen; on laptop computers, instead of a mouse there's a pad you slide your finger on which moves the cursor
PC computer - Personal Computer, a computer of the type started by IBM; they are standardized and business oriented; not very compatible with Macs (yet)
MAC computer - a computer made by Apple, originally called the MacIntosh; designed for highly creative work such as photography, art, movie-making, music, etc.; not very compatible with PC's (yet)
COMPUTER PROGRAM - a set of commands that cause the computer to do tasks of many, many kinds, from writing letters to painting on your screen to finding music on the Internet
SOFTWARE - another term for Computer Program
APP - means Application, a program that functions in a way the user (you) wants, such as showing you the weather report, or which houses are for sale in the world; when you put an app on your computer, it will put an ICON (little symbol) on your DESKTOP (your screen) - you click on that icon to use that APP
INTERNET - the global set-up of computers that allows computers to connect with each other; to "surf" on the Internet with your computer, you need a "service provider" company that has hardware and software
WEBSITE or WEBPAGE - a piece of writing with images and hotlinks and/or other coded symbols on the Internet; websites are put onto the Internet for any of a gazillion purposes; there are copyright rules about using someone's website information for wide distribution or profit, but copying FACTUAL INFORMATION or other segments of information solely for personal use does not break copyright rules; a website can have one or many web pages
DOMAIN NAME - a unique name, similar to its URL, that allows a person to put up websites using that domain name; all domain names are registered and paid for with one agency; google is a Domain Name, and its URL is google.com; domain names and url's are not case sensitive
HOTLINK - text or other visible stuff (pictures, for instance) that are "linked" by invisible programming to another website or web page; clicking on a hotlink will take you to that website; hotlinks should be a color, usually blue, but sometimes people make hotlinks that look like plain text (why??); if you move your cursor over a hotlink, the hotlink instantly becomes underlined, and the cursor becomes a little hand instead of a capital I
ENTER key - pressing the Enter key activates a choice you have made; it used to also be called "RETURN" but that's only on older keyboards (older computer users might tell you to "hit return" -- they mean you should press the Enter key)
CURSOR - looks like a capital I if it's being moved in text areas, changing to an arrow in blank places or to a little hand when over a Hotlink; it will not change if it's over something it cannot take action on
BLINKING CURSOR - the Cursor changes to a Blinking Cursor when it is positioned over text and then the Mouse is clicked; the Cursor then becomes a blinking little vertical line about as tall as a lower case L; the Blinking Cursor is the point where your typing goes onto the page; it's also the point where you can start erasing lines of text by pressing the big button that says "Backspace" (usually found in the upper right corner of your keyboard)
PRACTICE: If you're here at the KRV Museum's website, move your cursor over to any of the dark red letters in the right column - they are hotlinks; you should see the cursor change into a little hand over those dark red letters (and a line appears under them)
MOUSE or MOUSE PAD: the control that moves the cursor; the Mouse looks approximately like a little mouse; it's usually connected to the computer by a wire, but there are wireless ones as well; the Mouse Pad is built into the laptop computer and substitutes for a mouse
CLICK on something - pressing the mouse or mousepad while the cursor is over a place you want to activate; probably 99% of the time you will do a LEFT CLICK, meaning you click the top left side of the Mouse, or bottom left corner of the Mouse Pad, then let go
RIGHT CLICK (top right corner of Mouse or bottom right corner of Mouse Pad) - will give you other functions to choose from; you Click on plain text to put the cursor into the text so you can begin typing or erasing or copying where the cursor is; you Click on a hotlink to connect you to the website that the hotlink is linked to.
CLICK AND DRAG - you don't just Click and let go, instead you push down on the mouse or pad as if to click, but you hold it down instead of letting go, which lets you move the cursor around the screen while "highlighting" everything the cursor passes over; when you have highlighted what you want, you let go of the mouse's corner (very carefully) and the highlighting stays where you put it
HIGHLIGHT - see Click and Drag above; highlighted parts on a screen are active and ready to be manipulated is some way; if it's text, you can erase it by pressing Backspace or Delete, or you can copy it by pressing Ctrl button and the C key together
UNDO - if you made a mistake, it can often be undone by going to the top line on the screen and clicking on Edit, then on Undo.
WORD PROCESSOR - a computer program that is used primarily for writing text
PRACTICE: If you want to read or go to another page of a website, click on your mouse while the cursor is over the hotlink, and it should take you to that section.
BROWSER - A computer program that looks around the Internet almost at the speed of light, trying to find the text string you have entered into the browser; Google is one of an endless number of browsers; Dogpile is another
(COMPUTER) PROGRAM - A set of computerized instructions that carry out varying actions on the Internet or on individual computers
PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE - a series of coded commands for making computers do things; by agreement, such languages are recognized by most computers, so that if one knows the language, one is able to do programming on many different computers
URL - Universal Resource Locator; this is a website's address. The URL of our museum is www.kernvalleymuseum.org There are two ways to "go to" a website: you can "search" for it in a "browser" like Google, or if you know the exact URL of the website, you can type it in the top line of an Internet-active screen, without any variation in spacing or punctuation, but it doesn't matter if you use capitals or lower case when putting a url into the top window of the screen; you can also put the url into Google's search screen and Google will usually find it for you that way. Each URL on the Internet is unique, and is owned by someone who pays to use it.
www - means "What went wrong?"
HAVE FUN!