How and why the internet works.

[Packer]

He does have paragraphs.

Not properly spaced so it still looks like one paragraph, not reading stuff that's not spaced out.

[Ad Bot]

[Wedge]

If a friend gave me their English essay and asked me to proofread it and make suggestions this is basically what I'd do. I don't have the time to go through and word all of my sentences passively and use wishy-washy phrases like "I think, I feel, please consider." So read it as a set of non-aggressive and constructive suggestions rather than a set of orders or complaints intended to point out absolutely every flaw. On

internet

I don't know if you have to turn in a copy of this or if your teacher cares about spelling or grammar, but the Internet is a proper noun and is always capitalized.

The internet and most computers got their start in the 1960’s when the U.S. military funded projects to create a backbone network for their computers. A backbone network links together various LANs or Local Area Networks. Local Area Networks, which are still used today, are a cluster of geographically nearby computers linked with their own infrastructure that allows high rates of data transfer and a great deal of reliability.

This video does a great job of summarizing the development of the Internet. Everyone is familiar with the ARPANET, although I think the British NPL network was also very important because of it's roots in commercial service. I don't think it's worth writing more then 2 or 3 sentences about the history of the Internet but you should check out the video anyway.

I don't really have a problem with this statement though so feel free to leave it as is.

It allows the servers (and subsequently networks) of large companies, small companies, personal computers, governments, schools, and a vast array of other networks to all be linked together with an elaborate physical and digital architecture.

You haven't introduced the concept of a server yet. Try something like "The Internet consists of the cables and machines that allow computers to talk to each other. The World Wide Web is just the small part of it that's visible to us, the interconnecting set of websites."

Within your house, you can use everything within your house with perfect ease, after all, it is your house and you are within it.

This sentence is a little awkward. Try "You can use anything in your house. It belongs to you so you don't need anybody else's permission." At the very least rephrase it to "You can use everything within your house you can use everything with perfect ease." The first "Within your house" and the third and fourth phrases "after all, it is your house and you are within it" is redundant. Within your house suggests that you are already in it. Be concise.

It requires very little infrastructure to get to your friend’s house. He is across the street, so you can just walk there. This is like a Local Area Network. Because a set of geographically close computers are, well, geographically close, you don’t need a vast and complicated infrastructure to access data between the two computers, usually a router and some Ethernet cables. Anything more would be like using a tram to get across the street: It’s inefficient to use rapid transit to move across the street.

Replace "Because a set of geographically close computer are, well, geographically close," with "When two computers are fairly close (within the same building) you don't need any complicated infrastructure to access data between the two computers." You should go on to give an example of a local area network: your own home network if you share the Internet or a school computer lab.

But let’s say you want to use your friend’s washing machine that lives on the other side of this vast metropolis. You probably first drive your car to a bus or subway station and have your friend pick you up and bring you back to his house. This is exactly what the internet is, or, rather the subway is the internet. It allows data to move throughout smaller networks in an efficient manner.

I don't drive my car to a bus and then have a friend pick me up there. I either drive a car to their house, take a bus or get on a subway train. Also, to encompass all of the situations you described, you should use the generic phrase "the Internet is your transportation to your friend's house."

The World Wide Web is the houses themselves and what is inside them. Now, how you get around between them so efficiently that we no longer think about it except when it doesn’t work is an entirely different and complicated thing.

Something like "Basically, the World Wide Web are the people and places you visit and the Internet is how you get from your house to your friend's house" might work better. In the sentence "Now, how you get around between them so efficiently that we no longer think about it except when it doesn’t work is an entirely different and complicated thing," the prepositional phrase "except when it doesn't work" kind of breaks up the sentence. In my own writing, if I suspect a sentence isn't clear, I break it down into chunks and start deleting them. If the sentence still makes sense after I deleted a large portion of it, then it is too long and I should look for a better way to introduce the information. In this instance the sentence "How you get around between them so efficiently is an entirely different thing," still makes sense so I would try and find a way to break it up. Maybe bump "We usually don't think of the Internet until it's not there. Maybe your favorite site is down or you can't access the Internet altogether" down as an introduction to the next paragraph.

Perhaps the most efficient way to approach the question of how the internet works is to start at the simplest thing you can do, it may seem: Type in a URL into your URL bar and hit enter. On my computer at home, it takes about half a second (if that) to load a page after I press enter. It’s really quite miraculous, considering everything that is going down as soon as you hit enter.

Basically the only place I use the term URL is when I'm typing out messages to you guys and entering the url bbcode for linking. When I talk to people I use the terms link and address. I call it an address bar. I don't know what you and your friends called it but I'm sure it's not url bar and I think it would be good if you adopted whatever language they used.

Now, I could get really, really complicated. Namely tracing all the electrical impulses through data cables, flashes of light through fiber optics and signals from satellites to satellite dishes. I will not, for the sake of time, I will however go into more detail than you could possibly require about where all the data goes.

It sounds like you're trying to insult your audience here. I know you're not, but try to avoid things like "I *could* get really complicated" because typically the next few words that follow equate to "but I'm not because it would be a waste of time on you simpletons." Just pretend things you don't want to talk about don't exist and suggest books for further reading that address the things you glossed over. For bonus points check to see if they are in your school library first, then tell people they are in the library.

(most likely) phonetic word

All words are phonetic. A random strings of letters is an example of something that is not phonetic.

(which I’ll get into later, but they’re hard to remember with IPv4’s sequence of: xxx.xx.xxx.xxx and IPv6’s sequence of xxxx:xxx:x:xxxx:x:xxx:xx)

Come on, imagine you are reading this aloud to a group of people. "Hi. An IP follows the sequence of X X X dot X X X (you forgot an x, 192.169.1.100 is a valid IP), X X X dot X X X." Nobody is going to remember that. Try "a sequence of 4 numbers separated by periods. Each number is between 1-3 numbers." Then draw a few sample IP addresses on a board.

When you introduce the concepts of IPs and DNS servers, amaze everyone by telling them typing 72.14.204.104 into their browser will magically get them to google.

The highest layer, the Link layer, is the first connection between physical hardware and data. Next up is the Internet layer.

There should be nothing above the highest. Unless you were trying to say "next up" as in next up in a list, in which case just use next. Replace where you use the word "next" to introduce the transport layer with "then" so you don't repeat next again (which is why I assume you used next up in the first place).

So to sum up: when you press enter, you’re pinging (requesting information) through the Link and Transportation layers from the DNS. When the DNS returns the IP address, the data requested from the server located at the IP address used returns through the vast physical infrastructure of the internet. The data is interpreted by your browser and displayed on your screen, all within a second.

Don't introduce the word pinging. Just say you're fetching the IP address from the DNS server. Replace the word server with computer, unless you want to talk about servers too. You could put it put in your big brown townogy for the Internet, something like "we call the destination a server because they are giving you a service. Your computer is called the client, basically a customer."

[Sirrus]

Thanks for taking time to do that, it really helps.

[Sirrus]

Here's an updated version with most of Wedge's suggestions, a new section about HTTP and RDP and spaces between paragraphs for Packer.

How and Why the Internet Works.
By Otis the Packer.

Most of you take the Internet for granted. In fact, it is probably one of the most overlooked technologies of my generation. It has gotten to a point where it is so useful that it is an extension of our own thought processes and routines. Some of you may have a phone that links you into the Internet, constantly keeping you updated about the happenings in your circle of friends, community, country, and the world.

However it is my belief that one of the single most important things a student can learn is how to interface with computers and where they came from as we move towards a society built on, in, and around computers.

The Internet and most computers got their start in the 1960’s when the U.S. military funded projects to create a backbone network for their computers. A backbone network links together various LANs or Local Area Networks. Local Area Networks, which are still used today, are a cluster of geographically nearby computers linked with their own infrastructure that allows high rates of data transfer and a great deal of reliability.

Eventually backbone networks will evolve into the Internet backbone, but we’re still a long way off from the Internet and subsequently the World Wide Web.

It is important right now to distinguish between the World Wide Web and the Internet. The Internet is a network of networks. It consists of the cables and machines that allow computers to talk to each other. The World Wide Web is what we have assigned the name “the Internet”. It is what makes up the content of the web, using the Internet as its infrastructure.

Imagine a computer as a house. A neighborhood is a Local Area Network. The entire city and its surrounding metropolitan area is the Internet as a whole. Within your house, you can use everything with perfect ease and with no infrastructure necessary to access it. But let’s say you want to go see something in your friend’s house across the street. It requires very little infrastructure to get to your friend’s house. He is across the street, so you can just walk there. This is like a Local Area Network. When two or more geographically nearby computer need to communicate, you don’t need a vast and complicated infrastructure to access data between the two computers. Usually a router and some Ethernet cables will suffice. Anything more would be like using a tram to get across the street: It’s inefficient to use rapid transit to move across the street.

But let’s say you want to use your friend’s washing machine that lives on the other side of this vast metropolis. Imagine the Internet as your transport between your house and your friend’s house. It allows data to move throughout smaller networks in an efficient manner. The World Wide Web is the houses themselves and what is inside them. Now, how you get around between them so efficiently that we no longer think about it is an entirely different and complicated thing.

Perhaps the most efficient way to approach the question of how the Internet works is to start at the simplest thing you can do: Type a URL into your address bar and hit enter. On my computer at home, it takes about half a second (if that) to load a page after I press enter. It’s really quite miraculous, considering everything that is going down as soon as you hit enter.

What you’re really doing is requesting data from a specific location on the Internet. Because you usually type phonetic words into the address bar, the first protocol (a set of instructions for computers to communicate over the Internet) that you will travel through is the Domain Name System. It assigns a meaningful alphanumeric sequence to difficult to remember IP addresses (which I’ll get into later, but they’re hard to remember with IPv4’s sequence of four numbers, each separated by periods and between 1 and 3 digits long and IPv6’s four hexadecimal numbers). Once your URL travels through the DNS, an IP Address is returned

An IP address is essentially an address for the Internet. It tells TCP or the transport layer where to route data, but before we get to the transport layer, it is important to understand the application layer. And before we delve into the application layer, it’s important to understand what these layers are.

TCP/IP or The Internet Protocol Suite is essentially a vast collection of protocols working in synchronization. It is comprised of four layers, from lowest to highest: Application, Transport, Internet and Link. This is where it begins to get complicated

The highest layer, the Link layer, is the first connection between physical hardware and data. Next is the Internet layer. It handles all routing of data and internetworking (as mentioned before, the Internet is multiple networks communicating). It contains the Internet Protocol (IP) which is, as you’ll recall, is the addressing system for the Internet. Next is the Transport layer. It is responsible for the data while the data is being transported. It sorts out the data while it’s being moved around and makes sure it arrives in its entirety in the correct order it was sent. The Transport layer consists mainly of the protocol TCP (Transmission Control Protocol). As stated in the sentence prior, it controls the higher level (closer to your personal computer and farther from the infrastructure in which the data is transported) data operations, such as data exchange rates and network traffic control.

Finally we have the Application layer. It is the lowest level of the TCP/IP model and handles the data while it is en route to its destination. When you use a very specific service such as AIM, you’re using a special protocol within the application layer.

So to sum up: when you press enter, you’re requesting information through the Link and Transportation layers from the DNS. When the DNS returns the IP address, the data requested from the computer located at the IP address used returns through the vast physical infrastructure of the Internet. The data is interpreted by your browser and displayed on your screen, all within a second.

This is roughly the procedure when trying to access a page off of a server and know the URL (or IP address). When traveling between two pages on the internet, you use the hypertext transfer protocol or HTTP. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol is responsible for a lot of stuff on the internet and subsequently shows up a lot, even if we don’t recognize it.

For example, the http:// at the beginning of URLs is telling the browser that you want to locate information using the hypertext transfer protocol. Because an internet browser can also technically be used to access information off of your own computer, the HTTP:// at the beginning of the URL identifies that you want to access information through the internet. Now, this has fallen out of practice mainly because as computers got more and more commercialized and less for use by trained professionals in the field, HTTP:// simply was assumed when typing a URL in because people assumed that when you use an Internet browser, you are only accessing data off the Internet.

Also the error codes, the most famous of which HTTP 404 – File not found. It occurs when a file (or webpage) is not found on the server. Others like HTTP 403 – Forbidden occur when trying to access a file on the server and you cannot access even with authorization, whereas HTTP 401 – Unauthorized if you have proper authentication within your request you can access the file.

The HTTP is a powerful way of organizing and accessing data on the Internet; however it isn’t the only protocol we use every day. Remote Desktop Protocol (what the RDP stands for under ‘connection type’ when logging onto the server from some computers in our school) is a protocol designed by Microsoft for Windows XP initially. It allows the client computer (your computer) to access all of the data on the host computer (the computer you’re accessing) in a Graphical User Interface similar to your Windows desktop.

The Internet is a mighty tool that unfortunately, many of us take for granted. The Internet as we know it now is a culmination of more than half a century of some of the brightest minds in science and technology working together to create something that has become so indispensible to us. The Web you use every day is just the most visible part of the massive iceberg of the Internet, and understanding how it operates, while it may seem pointless to you, is a wonderful asset to have when interfacing with these machines that we use every day for so many tasks in our lives.
   

[Madmitten]

Not properly spaced so it still looks like one paragraph, not reading stuff that's not spaced out.

because when re-writing an essay to a forum full of starfishs, he needs to have perfect spacing and spelling.

[JJA0]

because when re-writing an essay to a forum full of starfishs, he needs to have perfect spacing and spelling.

Also nice really long essay that i don't have time to read atm ill read it later.

[RedSaturn]

Wow, I thought this would be a so-so essay, but no, it is very good.
I'll rate for you 10/10, I bet this could be an intresting novel.