What is the Internet? How does it work?

The internet is where we spend hours a day. It's where we play games, text with our friends, and even read this post right now. So what is this internet? How does it work? How does an article or a video appear on your screen? How can you easily enter the site you want?

History of the Internet

The history of the Internet dates back to the Cold War era. When it was first created, the purpose of the internet was to allow armies to communicate quickly. During the Cold War period, Russia could easily make a nuclear attack on any point on Earth with the first artificial satellite Sputnik 1, which it sent into space.

In response, America established a technology organization, which developed the first internet, ARPANET, in 1966. ARPANET was connected to many computers and the system was tested in 1969. The first word to be sent to the connected computers in the system was “login” (“login”), but since the system crashed after the first two letters were entered, the first information entered in the history of the internet was “lo”. While the internet was in a stagnant state until 1989, it experienced its first milestone with Tim Berners-Lee's world wide web.

Now there were websites and people could access them. However, with the increase of web pages in the following period, another problem arose. There were too many web pages but people couldn't find them. Users could only access the pages that they heard by word of mouth or that reached them via e-mail. In 1990, the first search engine Archie was founded by Alan Emtage and the internet saw its second turning point. After that, the Veronica and Jughead search engines, which did the same function, were offered to the public. But these search engines still had shortcomings. In 1994, the first full-text search engine, WebCrawler, was released. After WebCrawler, many full-text search engines emerged, but the most popular among users at that time was Yahoo!, founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang. It was a search engine. By 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin's Google was launched and gradually gained the title of king of the market.

How Does the Internet Work?

For example, you want to transfer files to each other with your friend at home and you have easily connected your computers with any CAT6 or CAT5 cable. Congratulations, you now have a network (network). Suppose your neighbor has created his own network and you want to receive a file from him. For this, you connect your own network to his network and thus you create a small interconnected network, namely the internet. This is how the internet we normally use works.

All computers connected to the Internet are connected to each other by kilometers of fiber optic cables. When you want to watch a video on Youtube, your device connects to Google's data center, which is miles away, and receives the video in packets from there. Of course, it does this through the binary number system, namely 1s and 0s. As shown below, the frames within the video are represented as 1 and 0 and are transmitted piecemeal. We can call 1 and 0 here as open or closed. If light comes from fiber optic cable, it is 1, if not, it is 0.

 Representation of a shape in the binary number system

 

What is an IP Address?

We said that our devices connect to data centers of websites. So how do our devices do this? First of all, every device on the internet has an Internet Protocol address, that is, an IP address. We can think of IP addresses as our home address. Your IP addresses are determined by your internet provider.

Along with the IP address of the servers in the data center, there are also domain names. In our daily life, we do not write 69,63,176.13 on Facebook. For this, your internet provider has a DNS server that functions as a phone book. In the DNS server, domain names represent names and IP addresses represent numbers. When you type a site name, the DNS server finds the IP address of that site and connects you there. Then, as we mentioned, data flows from the servers to your system piece by piece. These small pieces are called packets and each packet holds some data other than the information in it. These are the IP address of the sending device, the IP address of the receiving device, and the packet sequence.

If you do not enter the information correctly when sending a letter, there will be a big confusion, your letter may go to the wrong place. Certain protocols such as HTTP are used to avoid any problems while transferring packets on the Internet. These are network protocols that divide data into packets, determine the transmission path, and check if the packet is the same data when it arrives.

Packets coming from data centers are transferred to your modem, your modem converts these incoming light vibrations into electrical vibrations and transfers them to us via ethernet cable. In mobile data, the packets are transferred to the base station with fiber optic cables, where they are converted into electromagnetic waves and transferred to our phone.

In fact, the internet, which we spend hours on every day, works intensively throughout the day. In order for us to access the Internet comfortably at home, data transfer is made remotely for kilometers every second, via cables. The internet does its job very meticulously. Our duty is to use the internet correctly. As Neil Smith said:

“The only hope we have is the internet. We must strive to keep him free.”