How the Internet Actually Works

Hey Amanda,

Can you smell it? Nostalgia just invited you to dinner

 Okay, as a kid I wanted to know how the internet worked and I always got these mystical answers like the internet was some deity that was everywhere and nowhere. It's was a vast cloud, too complex to explain, where information just...was.

Yeah, that's crap.  The internet is a cable. Literally.  It's a huge web of cable with a host of literal routers that shunt information from one place to another. Sometimes that information travels via radio waves to satellites-but mostly it's real, actual cable. (There is a tangible wire that runs under the Atlantic that connects the American internet with Europe for instance). And when 10 year old me played Neopets, my Scorchio physically existed as a bundle of 1's and 0's (electrical charges) my computer interpreted as this:

Scorchio was saved temporarily on my computer through the wonder of the internet. But Scorchio and the rest of the Neopets World lived in Secaucus, NJ at the Viacom Data Center. In one of its hundreds of servers, my Neopet account information was stored. (And of course Viacom being a huge company, has many backup servers but ignoring that) if a freak meteorite hit that particular server, my Scorchio would cease to exist. It wasn't everywhere and nowhere, that tiny piece of the internet has a mailing address, as does every other tiny corner of the internet. There is no mystical internet cloud, just very well-planned, redundant servers saving multiple back-ups of your google doc Master's thesis, or that Youtube video of "Tearin' Up My Heart" or your Picassa album of JTT collages.

Photo Credit

So this is how the internet works.
Because you're human, you can accurately remember and type in "zombo.com" but not 69.16.230.117. But that string of numbers (the IP address) is what your computer needs to reach the server in Michigan where that page "lives."

So your computer asks your internet service provider (Time Warner, Quest, Comcast, etc) what's the IP address for zombo.com. Your internet service provider probably says "I don't know let me ask another server."

So your internet provider asks the "dot" Server, who says "Ask the 'dot com' server she'll know--this is her number."

So your internet provider asks the "dot com" server who says "Ask the 'zombo dot com' server--this is his number"

So your internet provider asks the "zombo dot com" server who says "Yes, you want to access the hompage--this is it's IP address"

So your ISP shoots off that IP address to your computer who then whizzes off to Michigan, picks-up packets of information for the font, color, and layout of the homepage, whizzes back through your modem then loads those packets up on your monitor.

All of those queries and that data retrieval only took a fraction of second.*

Your computer then saves the IP address for zombo.com in your cache. So next time, it doesn't have to wait for five servers to respond before it can load the zombo homepage. (That's why when a page is updated, sometimes you have to clear your cache for it to display correctly since your computer assumes it still has the same IP address, but the new version has been saved to a different server, etc.)

Cool huh.

*Next time you overhear someone mouthing off about how slow the internet is and having a crappy day about it, just think--sheez dude, your computer is literally sending queries across the country trying to help you out. Be a little grateful. And call your mom and tell her you love her because life is pretty freaking fantastic.

I dare you to say "Internet and the speed of information transfer" at the Thanksgiving table this year because seriously, your life is amazing,

Stephanie

knowledge: an internet connection, and a curious mind

Many thanks to Barry Brown of Youtube/ Sierra College and Wikipedia.