Much of the average person's trepidation regarding the computer comes from the fact that they are not familiar with the highly technical terminology associated with computers.

In most cases, a person doesn't have to understand complex jargon to work with a computer, but every now and then some necessary geek-speak creeps in. This is the case with Internet addresses, which are also called URLs or Uniform Resource Locators.

Although I have broached this topic before, your continued questions prompt me to give you another brief explanation of URLs.

A typical URL would look like this: http://www.sandyberger. com

The first part of the address before the colon is the access method. Most of the time you will see http, which means that you are accessing a page on the Internet.

The colon and the slashes are special separators that the computer understands. They are codes from the UNIX operating system.

For those of you who are familiar with DOS, you will find that DOS uses the backslash (\) while UNIX uses the forward slash (/).

After the slashes and the colon you will usually see an indicator such as www. This stands for World Wide Web. There is always a period after the www. Then comes the domain name, in this case sandyberger, which is the place where the information is located.

The domain is followed by another period. This is followed by an extension which is usually comprised of three digits. The extension indicates the type of organization involved.

Some common extensions are:

-- com for commercial

-- edu for educational institution

-- gov for government

-- int for international

-- mil for military

-- net for network

-- org for organization

You might also see foreign addresses that add a country code as the last several digits of the address, such as:

-- au (Australia)

-- ca (Canada)

-- fr (France)

-- it (Italy)

-- us (United States of America)

Some addresses are on the Internet but are not necessarily the part of the Internet called the World Wide Web.

Addresses like that are rare for commercial Web sites, but you need to know that they do exist.

Such an address would be accessed by typing http://sandy berger.com (with no www).

When you are looking for a Web page, you can sometimes guess the correct address if you understand how addresses are formed. For example, if you wanted to find the Coca Cola Co., a good guess at the address would be http://www.cocacola.com.

In most Web browsers you do not have to enter the http://. You would simply enter www.cocacola.com. In some Web browsers like Netscape, Firefox and Opera you can simply type the word coke and you will be taken to the proper Web site.

If you are working in Internet Explorer and you don't want to type in the http://www or the .com, you can type coke then hold down the CTRL key and press the Enter key.

When working with URLs, you should be aware that the three letters after the period can make a big difference.

For instance, for many years, www.whitehouse.com was owned by a company that hosted a pornographic Web site at that location. Now typing in that address will transport you to House.com, a home-selling Web site. If you want the official White House governmental Web site you need to type in www.whitehouse.gov

The Internet is a treasure chest of information. You must have a key to unlock this high tech chest. URLs are the keys. The faster you master them, the easier it will be to open that chest and enjoy the riches of the Internet.