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Information Superhighway
This is a buzzword from a speech by Al Gore that refers to the Clinton/Gore administration's plan to deregulate communication services and thus widen the scope of the Internet by opening carriers, such as television cable, to data communication. The term is widely and loosely used to mean the Internet, and it's often shortened to I-way, the infobahn, and so on.
Intranet
A play on the word Internet, an intranet is a restricted-access network that works like the Web, but isn't on it. Usually owned and managed by a corporation, an intranet enables a company to share its resources with its employees without confidential information being made available to everyone with Internet access.
ISDN
Integrated Services Digital Network
The plain old telephone system doesn't handle large quantities of data, and the phone companies realized this a long time ago. So the ISDN spec was hammered out in 1984 to allow for wide-bandwidth digital transmission using the public switched telephone network. Under ISDN, a phone call can transfer 64 kilobits of digital data per second. But it's not always easy to adopt.
ISP
Internet service provider
Once upon a time, you could only connect to the Internet if you belonged to a major university or had a note from the Pentagon. Not anymore: ISPs have arrived to act as your (ideally) user-friendly front end to all that the Internet offers. Most ISPs have a network of servers (mail, news, Web, and the like), routers, and modems attached to a permanent, high-speed Internet "backbone" connection. Subscribers can then dial into the local network to gain Internet access--without having to maintain servers, file for domain names, or learn Unix.