Lesson 1: What is the Internet?

So here's the first installment of my new designated "internet blog." I figure I'll start at the very beginning: What is the internet?
Well, first of all Dictionary.com defines the internet as:

A vast computer network linking smaller computer networks worldwide (usually preceded by the ).

The Internet includes commercial, educational, governmental, and other networks, all of which use

the same set of communications protocols.

The first paragraph of the Wikipedia Page for the "Internet" expands on this a bit more:

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support electronic mail.

Now maybe you're like me, and were caught up on a particular reference in the last paragraph, perhaps, it was TCP/IP?. I'm going to look up this acronym now.

TCP/IP-Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP):

After reading several articles on these acronyms, I decided on this explanation from pcmag.com's encyclopedia:

The TCP/IP suite provides two transport methods. TCP ensures that data arrive intact and complete, while UDP just transmits packets. TCP is used for data that must arrive in perfect form, and UDP is used for real-time applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and videoconferencing, where there is no time to retransmit erroneous or dropped packets.


TCP/IP is a routable protocol, and the IP network layer in TCP/IP provides this capability. The header prefixed to an IP packet contains not only source and destination addresses of the host computers, but source and destination addresses of the networks they reside in. Data transmitted using TCP/IP can be sent to multiple networks within an organization or around the globe via the Internet, the world's largest TCP/IP network.

I also really liked this "non-techie-person" explanation from A.P. Lawrence:

Think about the early telegraphs and Morse code. Press the telegraph key in the right pattern and that means the letter "A" to the person at the other end of the line. Morse code is just patterns of "on" and "off"...The Internet uses patterns of "on" and "off" too. In Morse code, it's "dahs" and "dits"; on the Internet we call it 0's and 1's. Same idea, different words. "Dah" and "0" are "off", "dit" and "1" are "on". There is one important difference. Morse code is variable length. An "A" is "dit-dah" and a "B" is "dah-dit-dit-dit". Internet code (TCP/IP) is always eight units long. An "A" is "01000001" and a "B" is "01000010"...It gets just a teeny bit more complicated. There are a lot of computers out there: yours, mine, a few at Google, IBM, Yahoo.. if I want to send "ABABAB" to Google (think how happy they will be to see that!), how do I get it there?

I wrap it in a packet. Some people like to explain this as an "envelope" and they talk about writing the address on the envelope, but it's just more 0's and 1's and it's always eight at a time. Those eight zero's and ones are a "byte" and some of the bytes in the packet say where it's going and some say where it is coming from...Inside the packet, if we're looking at the part that has the address of the computer the packet came from, the bytes always mean just that: where it came from.

But the data, the "010000010100001001000001010000100100000101000010" part, might not mean "ABABAB". It might mean 65, 66, 65, 66, 65, 66. Or it might mean a color or a sound - it depends on how the other end interprets it. Paul Revere said "one if by land, two if by sea". You can't really know what "ABABAB" means unless you know what it is supposed to mean.

Here's a visual from pcmag.com:

Now if you're not thoroughly confused by the explanation of the linking protocol of the internet, we can move on to internet coding, also known as the language of the internet, or HTML.

Here is what a great little tutorial website called Page Tutor says about HTML coding:

The basic idea is this... A web page is nothing more than a file, an HTML file to be exact. It's called HTML because web page documents have the file extension .html or .htm. HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language.

Here's an elaboration on HTML from Wikipedia:

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags, enclosed in angle brackets (like ), within the web page content. HTML tags normally come in pairs. The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags programmers can add text, tables, images, etc.

The purpose of a web browser is to read HTML documents and compose them into visual or audible web pages. The browser does not display the HTML tags, but uses the tags to interpret the content of the page.

HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. It can embed scriptsin languages such as JavaScript which affect the behavior of HTML webpages.

An analogy that I came up with is thinking of viewing the internet as watching an extremely well-dubbed foreign film. Your web browser is taking a different language that you don't speak and seamlessly translating it into a language that you do understand, although, the origin of the web content is still based in the foreign language. This leaves you with a choice, you can carry on simply viewing what is translated to you, or you can choose to learn the code, which gives you the power to not only read the content in it original form, but eventually enables you to start creating the content yourself. The latter is what I intend to do, and you can join me here, as I publish my step-by-step process to learning the language of the internet and how communication inside the network conducts itself. Stay tuned.