The Internet

Internet is part of our lifestyles, from communicating with friends and families around the world, shopping, researching, playing games, learning a language, gambling to finding your soul mate. Nowadays, we don't do much of the "traditional things" like going to a library to for doing a specific research or to visit every shop to purchase a particular item you have been looking for. Why would we waste our precious time on such, when we have access to anything at our fingertips from anywhere in the world just with a PC and Internet access. Ever wondered how it works, where it was originated? Or if you have ever thought what would you be doing now, rather how would it be if there was no Internet? Here's a few terms and concepts of what it is and how it works, and the birth…

Definition

The global collection of inter-connected computer networks that all use the TCP/IP protocols and share a common addressing scheme, the Internet Protocol (IP).

One of the greatest things about the Internet is that nobody really owns it. It is a global collection of networks, both big and small. These networks connect together in many different ways to form the single entity that we know as the Internet. In fact, the very name comes from this idea of interconnected networks.

How it works

The Internet only moves computerized information (data packets) from one place to another. That's it! The machines that make up the Internet treat all the information they handle in exactly the same way (with the use of TCP/IP). Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) prepares the data to be sent and received.

The data movement: The data that you are sending does not travel to its destination directly (from sending an email to browsing) but it gets broken up into separate data packets. The Internet Protocol side of TCP/IP labels each packet with the unique Internet address, or IP. Since these packets will travel separate routes (via routers), some arriving sooner than others, the Transmission Control Protocol side of TCP/IP assigns a sequence number to each of packets. These sequence numbers will tell the TCP/IP at its destination how to reassemble the packets once it is received. Amazingly, the complicated process of TCP/IP takes place in a matter of milliseconds.

Browsing: each web site has an address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The URL contains a set of instructions that are read by the browser (IE, Firefox, etc). The document formatting language used to link documents is called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).

The beginning of the URL contains the protocol. This is usually "http" (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or "ftp" (File Transfer Protocol). The second section of the URL reveals the domain (the host name, i.e. the server of the website, where the details are stored), directories follow the domain. Lastly is the name of the document. (If no document is named the browser will automatically open any document in the directory named "default" or "index.")

History

Believe it or not, something that dominates our lifestyle now was actually initiated to protect us. The roots of Internet date back to October 1969, when the US Defence Department's ARPAnet first came online. It became apparent that there was a need for a bombproof communications system. A concept was devised to link computers together throughout the country. Since then the Internet has grown from four host computer systems to tens of millions. While this was not the first long-range computer network, it was the first to use packet-switching methods to ensure data integrity, optimized bandwidth utilization, and reliability. However, the TCP/IP protocol was not implemented until January 1983, when the United States' National Science Foundation established their university network. With Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web in 1991, the Internet gained public interest. However, just because nobody owns the Internet, it doesn't mean it is not monitored and maintained in different ways. The Internet Society, a non-profit group established in 1992, oversees the formation of the policies and protocols that define how we use and interact with the Internet, securities and all that jazz.

Therefore, Internet existed since 1970's but the WWW only came by 1990's.

People say "Dog's a Man's bestfriend!" I'll say "Internet is my best friend!"