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URLs, DNSs, and IP Addresses.

Every computer on the Internet has a unique serial number or IP address such as "204.138.115.211". Humans aren't good at remembering numbers, so most Internet computers also has a human-readable domain name such as "moo.schoolnet.ca". There are dozens of computers on the Internet that only do a single job, they translate domain names into IP addresses. This is called the DNS (Domain Name Service). Without the DNS one would always have to type in a bunch of numbers every time one sent e-mail or looked up a web page. There are several available DNS gateways which will do DNS lookups (names to numbers) and reverse DNS lookups (numbers to names).

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a particular document on the Internet. A URL is made up of the type of protocol used to get the document (http, gopher, ftp, news, telnet, etc), the domain name of the server it is on (moo.schoolnet.ca, altavista.digital.com), an optional port number, and finally the path and filename of the document itself.
Here are some sample URLs:

http://www.schoolnet.ca/index.html
telnet://moo.schoolnet.ca:7777
ftp://ftp.schoolnet.ca/pub/
gopher://gopher.schoolnet.ca:419/11/Frequently.Used