The Internet is a global communication network, which connects numerous individual networks. It allows us to communicate with others even those who are living overseas or even at the opposite end of the world. We can exchange opinions, ideas, and thoughts over social media platforms with the help of the internet. It not just gives us freedom of speech but also allows us to think in a broader way after getting updates regarding the changes happening in the world and the news related to the topics we would love to know about.
Today, as we all know that Internet is used by billions of people around the globe. It is a decentralized system, which means no one owns or controls the internet by any means. So now the question must have arrived "How is the INTERNET being handled?"
People access the Internet with their cell phones because of the presence of various towers which are used for transferring data through it. There are various data centers to store user data and other related data. What is a data center? Data centers are rooms that are full of servers and are used to store large amounts of data safely inside them. Even big tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have their own data centers. To carry data between data centers and consumers, Fiber optic cables are used for a large amount. Earlier, internet access was carried over physical cables but today, wireless internet is in demand which is more useful as well as device friendly. A wireless network allows devices to connect to the internet without the use of any sort of wires. A device can even be far from the router and still remain connected to the internet. Now as we are talking about wireless networks then let us know about their types. There are basically two types of wireless networks: Wifi and cellular. Wifi is relatively simple while the cellular network is centralized.
Protocol : For establishing communication, it is much more important than communication has got a medium and it follows a certain set of rules. Internet Protocol is the set of standards for addressing and routing data over the internet. A computer is connected to the Internet and possesses a unique address. It talks to other computers connected to the internet because of the protocols.
IP ADDRESSES : Now to follow these protocols and to recognize every device in the network uniquely, every device over the internet possesses a unique address which is called an IP address. IP Addresses or Internet Protocol Addresses are simply some numbers that are used by computers to identify each other over the internet. One can get to know his/her device's IP Address through google. The present internet standard, called IPv4, allows only for about 4 billion IP addresses. That's why engineers developed IPV6 as a new standard that allows IP addresses to be as long as 39 digits which ensures that the world wouldn't go out of IP addresses any time soon.
After talking shortly about protocols and IP addresses, now let's talk about the real part of the internet which is the actual data that is transmitted. The data sent over networks is divided into packets. What is the packet? Packets are the small and basic unit of information transmitted over the internet. It contains the information in small pieces. A packet has two parts. The header contains information that lets the packet get to its destination point, which includes the length of the packet, its source and destination, and a checksum value that helps to detect if a packet was damaged in the transit.
World Wide Web : The World Wide Web is the most popular way to publish information on the internet for everyone to view. WWW offered a better user-friendly interface than various other internet applications. It always supported hyperlinks and allowed users to browse from one document to another document only with a single click. Over time, the web became quite sophisticated after supporting images, videos, gifs, and other content. So later in the 2000s, full-stack web-based applications started getting created. Though people now treat the web as a synonym for the internet still it will continue to remain only as one of many internet applications. Currently, the organizations with the most influence over the web are Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Mozilla. Any technologies which are adopted by these four organizations become the web standards.
Web browser : The web now requires a platform where its users can browse its content, so it felt the need for creating web browsers. A web browser is a computer software program that allows its users to download and view websites. Web browsers are available for desktop computers, tabs, smart TVs, and mobile phones. The first-ever widely used web browser was Mosaic. It was created by researchers at the University of Illinois. The Mosaic team later shifted to California and developed Netscape, which was the first commercially successful web browser in 1994. In 2022, currently, Google's Chrome had grown to be the most popular web browser with a market share of around 50 percent along with other web browsers such as Firefox, Safari, etc.
Domain Name System (DNS) : The Domain Name System (DNS) is the reason we can access hashnode by typing hashnode.com in our system's browser rather than the difficult-to-remember numeric address that the website contains. This system is hierarchical. For example, the .com domain is administered by a company called Verisign, which assigns sub-domains like google.com, and hashnode.com. Owners of these second-level domains, in turn, can make sub-domains such as mail.google.com and maps.google.com. Domain names are used by organizations to identify themselves to the public.
All these terminologies I have talked about above in this blog are regarding the internet, which has knowingly or unknowingly over the years helped to create and build such a huge network. The Internet will forever remain to be the most significant invention of humans.