Ever wondered how the internet works? Ever thought, what happens when you open a website? Or try to download files from a website? These are things we use every day, but fail to ask, what happens at the background when we use the internet.
In this article, I will be covering;
• What is the internet?
• IP, DNS, HTTP, PACKETS, ROUTERS, AND TCP: how they work together.
Internet is the global system of interconnected computers that communicate with each other, and this computers linked together are connected by wires (Fiber optic cable) or electromagnetic waves. It’s a network of networks(both client and servers); connected by local wires and transmission towers, but the entirety of the network is connected to another network in another country, which is also connected to a network in other countries (network of networks), that links billions of devices(phone, laptop, anything that can access the internet, both client and servers) together.
The communications are made possible through the help of IP, DNS, HTTP, PACKETS, ROUTERS, AND TCP.
Let's say you want to check a website (e.g www.wikipedia.org ), When you type the website on your web browser, it loads the page immediately, right? But few things happened behind the scene. Every device on the internet has an IP address (internet protocol). So, when we search for a website, is simply our devices (you: the clients) communicating with another device (server). Our web browser, send the Domain name(website address) which we have typed, to the DNS(Domain Name System: which you can also refer to as the phonebook of the internet), to help us look for the corresponding IP address of the website, and it sends its IP address to the web browser, which is used to connect our computers to its destination.
What is happening in our browser is, it sends a “REQUEST”(we have 4 major types of method requests: “GET, POST PUT AND DELETE”), to the Wikipedia server, and the Wikipedia server respond in a language called the HTTP(Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol). HTTP is a language used to communicate b/w web browser and a server. All this happens in nanoseconds.
For example, you want to download an image or any data from Wikipedia, or the site you visited. The data goes from the server to the client(your device) as PACKET(A small part of a large data that we send over the internet). When the file or image is too large, it breaks them down into different Packets, that travel through ROUTERS(Where our packet travel. You can see it more like Road route, where motorist pass) Router helps to keep packet moving smoothly from the server to its destination. These packets make their way to their destination, where they are reassembled in order, the TCP(transmission control protocol), manages the sending and receiving of data as packets, and it takes a full inventory of all packets received, and if all packets are there, it shows successful, but if all packets are not there, the TCP alerts the server to resend the packet that is not there, until it is shown successfully by the TCP.
Packets are made up of 0 and 1(binary) which are the atoms of information, that are transferred through a wireless network and fiber optic cable.
So, in conclusion, the internet is a designed art and architecture expressed in a set of PROTOCOLS(a well-known set of rules used to communicate between machines).
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