What is the Internet?
October 12th, 2007Go ahead, admit it. You don’t know what the internet really is. All you know is that you click on that blue "e" on your screen, and all of a sudden you’re connected to the internet, whatever that means. At the end of the day, you really don’t have to know what it really it, and you might not care. All you want is to be able to visit the 3 places on the internet that you care about, and use email.
The good news is that you’re not alone. There’s a LOT of people who feel just like you do. There’s more of you than there are geeks like me. And that’s why it’s absolutely critical that we do our best to explain something as simple as "What is the internet" in really basic terms. Why? Simply because it’s very dangerous for a lot of people to use something that they don’t understand especially when it connects them together. Think of a bunch of people who know nothing about driving a car, all driving about the city at the same time. The more people there are who don’t know what they’re doing, the more dangerous it is for everyone. Not convinced yet? You might be after your computer dies from viruses that you could have prevented. When your credit card number gets stolen right off your computer. Or when your kid posts your home address on their MySpace profile.
Scared yet? You should be. What you don’t know can hurt you. The good news is that you don’t have to be an expert to eliminate 90% of the risks associated with using the internet. The basis for this is simply understanding what the internet is. Let’s take a look…
The Phone-net
Think about your telephone. When you call someone, are you going online? Are you connecting to some kind of abstract thing called the Phone-net? Of course not. You just pick up your phone and you call someone and that’s all you care about. However, behind the scenes, your phone connects to a big system of interconnected phone lines, and in many ways, picking up your phone and calling someone, is like visiting a web site on the internet.
Here’s the truth about the internet. It doesn’t exist. There is no thing called the internet. It’s not some big box, or some building, or even the little blue "e" on your screen. All the internet really amounts to is the ability for computers to talk to each other and all speak the same language. Why is this such a big deal?
A common language
Think about trying to call someone in France who doesn’t speak a bit of English, and you don’t speak a single word of French. Sounds like a very productive conversation doesn’t it? Now imagine trying to call someone who lives in a building without telephone wiring.. Oh wait, you can’t because the phone lines don’t go there. It used to be the same way with computers. There was no universal language for them to talk to each other with, and some of them had no way to speak to other computers at all.
Several decades ago, some very smart people decided that computers could be more useful if they could all be connected and taught how to speak a common language. Computers are a little easier to teach than people, so in a remarkably short amount of time, every computer that was born, knew how to speak the same language as all the other computers that it connected too.
There’s only one missing piece, and that’s the role of the operator. In the old days, there was a real person who connected your call, now it’s all done by computers. The same thing happens when your computer wants to talk to another computer. Instead of having to keep track of the internet address of every computer in the world, it simply sends a message out to a bunch of computers that act as the "operators" of the internet, along with the question is has to ask, or the message it’s trying to send. The operator figures out how to get it to the right computer. But even still, all that’s happening is computers talking to each other. It’s that simple.
Ask and ye shall receive
When you talk to people, you can small-talk, talk about yourself, or you can ask questions to find out what they know. When computers talk, all they do is ask each other questions and get answers. Here’s a sample conversation that my computer had today:
- Anthony’s Computer (to operator):
I’m looking for the computers at CNN, and I want their home page - Operator Computer (to CNN Computers):
CNN Computers, I have a caller that wants your home page. - CNN’s Computers (answering operator):
Here it is ( sends over the home page for www.cnn.com ) - Operator Computer ( to my computer ):
Here is the homepage you requested from CNN. - Anthony’s Computer ( to operator ):
Now I’d like the page with the story about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize. Can you
send me that page? - Operator Computer ( to CNN Computers ):
Now I would like the page with the story about Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize. - CNN’s Computers ( answering ):
Here is that page ( sends the page to the operator ). - Operator Computer (to my computer):
Here is the page you wanted…
For as long as you keep browsing the web, this conversation keeps going on, back and forth.
There’s a bunch of things that the computers ask each other for, and send back and forth, but the 3 most popular things are:
- Web Pages that you look at in a web browser like Internet Explorer
- Emails that you read inside an email program
- Instant Messages that you type and send inside an instant message program.
I’ll explain each of these in future posts, but for now, I hope that this will help you understand a little more about what the internet is, and what it isn’t. It’s not a place, it’s not a thing, it’s just a description of how computers are connected and speak the same language.
