What Is an Internet Domain?

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Dave Andrews and today I'm going to explain to you what Internet domains are. Now when you are using the Internet on your computer it's important to remember that the only thing that really matters to the computer is a series of numbers that are called an IP address. Now on the Internet world these IP addresses are used to tie computers together and that's how you identify a computer on the Internet. What a domain name does is basically make that IP address easier to remember. So instead of remembering a whole bunch of numbers that's a sequence of four that could be up to three digits a piece, you just get to remember something simple like Google dot com, Yahoo dot com. I'm going to show you how to identify an IP address and show you how the domains work. Now on our computer, just as an explanation, let's pull up a command prompt by clicking on the start button and we are going to go to run on Windows XP. But on Vista I'm just going to type command and press enter. Now we are going to run a command called NS lookup which does a domain name system lookup. And that basically is going to return the IP address that's assigned to a domain that we type in. So for example let's say MSN dot com. As you can see we got an answer here, MSN dot com is tied to the IP address two o seven dot six eight dot one seven two dot two four six. So I'm going to come to the edit menu up here and just do a mark, that way I can highlight this address and press enter to copy it. So I'm going to open up my web browser and just to show you the proof of concept here, instead of typing in MSN dot com, I'm going to right click and paste in that IP address. Now in my web browser I'm just connecting to that number and I'm going to press enter. But as you can see what I have gotten is MSN dot com. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just explained to you how domain systems work."