How does the internet work?
Learning about the internet, some acronyms and the meanings behind them
Perpetually inspired
Before I dive into definitions and abbreviations, I wanted to credit the Web design and programming school Perpetual Education(PE) with the inspiration for this post. The inspiration came from the success checklist (a list of skills/concepts that the lessons reinforce) that every student has access to. Before I started learning Design and Programming at PE, I had about a million tabs open from different learning resources.
None of these resources really taught me anything and only reinforced the overwhelm and fear that many of us feel when learning a new concept. This fear was even more paralyzing for me due to my ADHD and Tourette’s Syndrome, which can make learning and focusing very difficult.
Every day, thanks to the bite-sized lessons, intelligent and engaging community, and modules like Study hall, we students get the chance to learn new concepts and reinforce old ones. The study hall and success checklist act like a compass, to keep you on track to ensure you aren’t falling down any unnecessary conceptual rabbit holes.
Ok, enough about how awesome PE is, now let’s get into the prompt (which I’ve paraphrased below) and what I learned while researching it.
How does the internet work, what are its moving parts, and what is the difference between the World Wide Web (WWW) and the internet? What do the following acronyms mean?
ISP
DNS
HTTP
FTP
WWW
The acronyms were the easiest part of this challenge, so let’s define those first
ISP: Internet Service provider
The ISP is a business that provides access to the Internet. They are like the middleman between you and the Internet. Along with internet access, the ISPs are usually the ones to provide infrastructure like modems/routers(sometimes combined) that facilitate internet access and allow you to interact with the outdoor infrastructure (i.e wires and cables.
Here in New York City, common ISPs are Spectrum and Verizon. If you live somewhere remote, you may not have access to this physical infrastructure and may need to rely on wireless data transmission (like satellite).
IP: internet protocol
An IP (or IP address) is a 4-part number (for example, 192.0.2.1) that is a unique identifier used to distinguish individual computers/devices(yes, smartphones have an IP) on a local network or the internet.
A protocol is just the official word for how data is transmitted. In this case, it governs how devices can communicate. Aside from providing the protocol, the device’s IP provides data about the device's location too.
DNS: Domain Name System
Often called “the phonebook of the internet”, the DNS is essentially a key: value pair where an IP is mapped to domain names (like perpetual.education). In other words, it translates human-friendly domain names to IP addresses, which are really mostly meant for machines to read.
Could you imagine typing out the IP for Perpetual Education every time you wanted to access a lesson? It would be a major pain!
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol
HTTP is an application layer protocol that facilitates communication between servers and browsers. Application layer just means that it is used by an application, in this case, a web browser. As a Web Developer, if you have ever worked with forms and heard of the POST or GET method(some people call them verbs), then you have already seen HTTP requests in action.
In a typical HTTP request, a client opens a connection to a server and waits for a response. The server responds with a code indicating the status of the request. You can see a list of the response status codes on MDN, however, I bet you know at least one! If you have ever seen a “404 page not found” error, then you have seen a response code in action.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol
FTP is yet another protocol, this time on the network (instead of an application, like we saw with HTTP). This network protocol defines the rules on how computers transmit files between themselves over the internet.
FTP enables the transmission of large data between computers, allowing hundreds of gigabytes(GB) at once without a hit in performance. Sending multiple files at once is no problem. FTP was first introduced to me as a PE student.
I use FTP to upload the files for my website projects from my computer(mostly text files like .html, .css but also image assets!) to the remote server(just another name for a computer with specialized software that serves files) that lives somewhere in PE Land.
WWW: World Wide Web
Simply put, the WWW refers to the totality of browsable pages locally (like a local network) and on the internet. The WWW is a distributed information system of interconnected documents. The documents also known as web pages, can connect to other pages through the use of hyperlinks, or in everyday vernacular, links. Just like the kind you click every day.
You have been accessing the WWW without even knowing it. You can thank Tim-Berners-Lee, an English Computer Scientist for that, as he is the Inventor of the WWW, and also implemented the first web browser and web server. You can read more about him here, but the short version is:
While working as a Scientist at CERN, he needed a quicker way to share information between different departments. In his own words:
Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.
— Tim Berners-Lee
So now that we have discussed the WWW, let’s define what the internet is and dive into some history too
The internet: Some history
The internet is often used but rarely defined. The Internet is a worldwide network of interconnected computers (called a network) that communicate using protocols. We have discussed some of them, like HTTP and FTP, but there are many others that won’t be discussed here.
Did you know that the Department of Defense (an American governmental agency), was an early funder of the internet? Back then, it was called the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), and access was limited to academics (like Tim Berners-Lee) and research organizations who had contracts with the DOD(Department of Defense).
Thankfully, that has changed and now the internet is for everyone. You can read more about internet history here.
Internet vs WWW
So, now that we have discussed the internet and the WWW what is the difference between the two? The WWW is actually a distinct part of the internet. It works on top of the infrastructure of interconnected computers called the internet. If the WWW are the pages you see on your device(computer, smartphone, etc), the internet is the network that these pages/digital information, like webpages, emails, and files travel across.
Does this make sense to you? Let me know in the comments below. I am sure I will update this post later as the difference becomes more clear to me!