What's the internet?

The TL;DR#

The internet is a network of computers all connected to each other and sharing information. 

• When you load a web page or send an email, you’re connecting to another computer and sharing data with it
• The internet is basically just a bunch of cables and wireless signals that let your computer talk to other computers
• The internet we’re used to is public, but there are also private networks within organizations called intranets 

The internet is probably the technology that’s the most widely used but the most poorly understood: learning about how it works will make your life a lot easier. So read this.

What’s the internet (theoretically)?#

Think about the things that you can’t do on your phone or laptop without an internet connection (i.e. on that flight from hell): loading websites, sending messages, watching movies, etc. What exactly is happening when you do this stuff, and how does the internet fit in?

Accessing the internet just means communicating with other computers out there in the world. Let’s go through these one by one:

• When you load a website, you’re downloading a series of HTML files from a server in the cloud (i.e. another computer)
• When you send an email, you’re sending data to another computer (usually through a server in the cloud)
• When you watch a movie on Netflix, you’re downloading data from a server in the cloud (or another computer if you’re using a Torrent)

It happens to be that most of the computers that you’re communicating with here are big servers in the cloud, but they’re still computers. The big reveal? That’s all the internet is: it’s the infrastructure that actually connects your computer and all of the other ones in the universe.

What’s the internet (literally)?#

The internet seems like it’s some larger than life, magical system, but it’s really just a network of connecting things. When you access the internet, you’re tapping into that network and communicating with a computer (or a group of computers) somewhere else, exactly like when you Airdrop dank memes to the poor sap sitting next to you. 

The simplest way to grok the concept of a computer network – and what the internet is – is to take a look at the early days, when the internet was just a few computers. The first (really) modern one was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, a very sexy name), and it was an effort to connect research computers at a few different universities. It looked like this:

These computers were literally connected to each other through cables, and that’s how they communicated (sent data back and forth). In the 70’s and 80’s, this network kept expanding and expanding (as they worked out some protocol issues) and the modern internet was born.

Today’s internet is built on 3 major pillars.