So basically for a computer apps class we're in our teachers asks us to do these things called "geek reports" where everyone in the class at least once presents a new technology or website. I decided to outgeek everyone and explain the internet and how it works and where it came from. This is what I have at the moment, I was wondering if anyone here that knew vastly more about the internet could check to make sure I'm not completely off on these facts: it's a vastly confusing topic that I feel like I just scratched the surface of.
How and Why the Internet Works.
By (LOL MY NAME)
Now, 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 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 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. 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 within your house with perfect ease, after all, it is your house and you are within 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
What you’re really doing is requesting data from a specific location on the internet. Because you typed a (most likely) phonetic word into the search bar, the first protocol (a set of instructions for computers for communicating 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: xxx.xx.xxx.xxx and IPv6’s sequence of xxxx:xxx:x:xxxx:x:xxx:xx). 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 up 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 make sure it arrives in it’s 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 specific protocol within the application layer.
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.
