| 3 meanings. First and most generally, a
place where information goes into or out of a computer, or both.
E.g. the serial port on a personal computer is where a modem would
be connected.
On the Internet port often refers to a number that is part of
a URL, appearing after a colon (:) right after the domain name.
Every service on an Internet server listens on a particular port
number on that server. Most services have standard port numbers,
e.g. Web servers normally listen on port 80. Services can also
listen on non-standard ports, in which case the port number must
be specified in a URL when accessing the server, so you might
see a URL of the form:
gopher://peg.cwis.uci.edu:7000/
This shows a gopher server running on a non-standard port (the
standard gopher port is 70).
Finally, port also refers to translating a piece of software to
bring it from one type of computer system to another, e.g. to
translate a Windows program so that is will run on a Macintosh.
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