What is the Internet?

Are you able to imagine life without the Internet in the current present times? Would you believe it if someone told you that without the internet the possibility of the world screeching to a halt is a big possibility and most financial institutions, governmental agencies and communication may abruptly cease to exist! Well this is not fiction as it is actually fact!

So what is the Internet? There are two ways of looking at it, the first being a net that holds modern society within its seams, the second more technical perspective is to see the internet as a network of networks, which is basically what it is.

To help us understand the mechanics of the Internet, it would be good to probe into its primary components which is hardware which include the computer that you are working with and reading this right now and the mobile device that is probably sitting next to you as well as the cables and wires that are running out of your desktop to the router which is allowing you access to the Internet among other things.

The second component is the software, and for the internet, they are commonly referred to as protocols. Protocols are basically the set of rules that machines are ‘set to follow’; they are sets of instructions that machines follow allowing them to communicate with each other.

In other words all the hardware in the world will be independent ‘stand alones’ if they did not have protocols. Internet protocols or IP (which we are sure is a term that you have heard a hundred times over) is the method through which data is sent and received from one device or computer to another on the Internet. This means that every single computer connected to the Internet has an IP address at the least which gives the device or computer a unique identification code setting it apart from all other computers on World Wide Web.

Without these protocols communication between machines simply cannot take place as they would not understand each other (remember the Tower of Babel), well it is true, as the Tower of Babel was never completed because people were not able to understand each other, the internet would never have come into existence if the same issue was to happen to machines.

Machines would not be able to send or receive information or data in meaningful context.

When data is sent (such as an e-mail) the data is divided and sent out to the cyber realm in small packets that and these packets reach a gateway computer that reads the packet and identifies the destination and promptly relays the packet to another gateway and this process is continued until the message arrives as a ‘whole’ to the destination address.

Now as the packets are divided the IP simply delivers these ‘packets of data’ to the destination, but it is up to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) to rearrange these packets in the right order for you to be able to make sense out of them.

When it comes to actual websites, a web developer will place a website on a specific web hosting server which has its own IP. When you enter the address a TCP signal is sent out to gather this IP, and then via passing through a series of other computers, your signal arrives at the web hosting server. The server then gathers the data you need for you to view the website, and sends this back to your specific IP address via the same method.

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