Online and offline

A Similar meaning is also given by the prefixes "cyber" and "e", as in words "cyberspace", "cybercrime", "email", and "e-commerce".

[8] Here is an excerpt from the 1950 book High-Speed Computing Devices:[8] One example of a common use of these concepts with email is a mail user agent (MUA) that can be instructed to be in either online or offline states.

The online or offline state of the MUA does not necessarily reflect the connection status between the computer on which it is running and the Internet i.e. the computer itself may be online—connected to the Internet via a cable modem or other means—while Outlook is kept offline by the user, so that it makes no attempt to send or to receive messages.

Similarly, a computer may be configured to employ a dial-up connection on demand (as when an application such as Outlook attempts to make a connection to a server), but the user may not wish for Outlook to trigger that call whenever it is configured to check for mail.

[10] (For related discussion, see MIDI timecode, Word clock, and recording system synchronization.)

A third example of a common use of these concepts is a web browser that can be instructed to be in either online or offline states.

When pages are added to the Favourites list, they can be marked to be "available for offline browsing".

In Internet Explorer version 6, the level of direct and indirect links, the maximum amount of local disc space allowed to be consumed, and the schedule on which local copies are checked to see whether they are up-to-date, are configurable for each individual Favourites entry.

[11][12][13][14] For communities that lack adequate Internet connectivity—such as developing countries, rural areas, and prisons—offline information stores such as WiderNet's eGranary Digital Library (a collection of approximately thirty million educational resources from more than two thousand web sites and hundreds of CD-ROMs) provide offline access to information.

With the growing communication tools and media, the words offline and online are used very frequently.

Online and offline distinctions have been generalised from computing and telecommunication into the field of human interpersonal relationships.