There are many devices connected to the internet everywhere around us: in our living rooms, in our pockets and even in some showers (yes, they exist!). In my view, anybody using the internet should at least be curious about how it works.
In many ways, we take the internet and the Web for granted. When we power up our device of choice, open up a browser, and go to a webpage, we expect it to open up and work. What’s going on under the covers is a ballet of simplicity. There are a lot of things happening, but the type of calls that are being made are simple and have stood the test of time from their very early creation points.
Don’t get me wrong, not everything under the hood is simple, but getting a basic understanding of the technical aspects of the Internet is not an esoteric thing either. Having the wrong introduction can make the internet seem almost too much for the feeble human mind to encompass. The nitty-gritty tedium of it all then becomes mind-numbing.
“But Ayiko, where do I even start?”, well, have you heard of How the Internet Really Works? Go buy it now. It’s an incredible comic-like illustrated book (…and yes, only 122 pages). It’s basically an introduction to how the internet works under the hood, designed to give people a basic understanding of the technical aspects of the Internet that they need (just enough technical details to be dangerous). For those who like feline creatures like cats, don’t even get me started. Like I said, go buy it.
Go! I’ll wait.
Having google-fu skills is not enough sometimes. You may find yourself in situations where you need to explain some concept to someone who has no technical background whatsoever. About a year ago, I had a hard time explaining to an old chap of mine how the Web works, and I confused him pretty badly. Then, after just looking at the pictures in the book, I got in touch with the automobile columnist in me and explained to him the workings of the Web on a higher level. Here’s a loose transcript of what I told him;
Vroom! Vroom! I’m here to talk about the big modern highways of information, that we also call the internet. It’s highways because the Web doesn’t just happen on a single central computer, oh no, it’s rather millions of computers everywhere on this planet all connected together by cables, antennas and satellites.
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“Highways‽,” you say, “But what… what drives on these highways?”. Not cars, not trucks, not tractors, but information. The highways exchange information with millions of ingoing and outgoing street connections. So when a phone or a computer is going to send a picture online, it goes through a “sheriff” aka an ISP (Internet Service Provider). It’s the ISP that allows it to enter the highway (…you know what sheriffs do) and vroom! The picture is among the billions of information which circulate everywhere and can be stored on any of the servers anywhere in the world.
“What are servers?”, I hear you say. They are computers used to store large amounts of data. Therefore, an image sent from a phone in Aru can be stored on a server on the other side of the ocean. Each piece of information which circulates has a unique code for us to identify it, just like each vehicle has its own number plate, you know, those numbers at the back. Therefore, it’s possible to trace all the places a piece of information, like that picture, has gone to in the vast world of the internet.
Now, if billions of information circulate at the same time, how do we find those of interest to us? Can you guess it? Can you? No‽ It’s what search engines like Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing …etc are for. (I bet you’ve never heard of that duck thing 😜). When we send a request, be it to find out the temperature in Rwenzori, watch a video of a cat smoking a cigar, or whatever. The search engine then sends its minions to look for information with ‘number plates’ similar to what we requested, and then presents them to us. All that I’ve described happens in just a fraction of a second, even a blink of an eye is too long.
I might not have made him understand the whole internet, who knows (he didn’t ask more questions), but does that really matter? I left him less confused than I did the last time around. He even did more work that day (thanks to me, hopefully 😉), slashing his backyard, than he had ever done in his life.
Did you buy How the Internet Really Works yet? Off you go!