Photo:
Eva Funderburgh

Senator Ted Stevens, (R-Alaska), U.S. Senate Commerce Committee hearing, June 28, 2006:

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Well…that’s one way of putting it, just not a very good way. Let’s see if we can’t come up with a definition that’s a bit more clear. The Internet is commonly referred to as a “network of networks”, which includes millions (yes, millions) of interconnected computer networks that are operated by commercial, academic, military and government institutions. Because these networks all use the same communication protocols (rules), they can share common online services, such as email, chat, file transfer and the World Wide Web, the service you are making use of at this very moment.

Defining Our Terms

Many people think that the terms Internet and World Wide Web (WWW) can be used interchangeably, which is not the case. The Internet is just the transport mechanism that moves data from one computer to another. Information Superhighway is actually not a bad metaphor, in that once you have a network of roads, many different types of vehicles can drive on them.

The WWW (isn’t it odd that it takes longer to say the initials that to say the whole words?) consists of billions (yes, billions) of interconnected pages, documents, multimedia clips and other resources. The defining characteristic of the web is the hyperlink, those colored, clickable bits of text (or images) which allow you to jump directly from one place to another. In order to make those jumps, every one of those billions of resources on the web must have a unique address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). URLs typically look like this: http://www.internetnewcomer.com. They are not case sensitive, which means that you could also use http://WWW.InternetNewcomer.com and the Internet wouldn’t care.

The other big player on the Internet is, of course, email. When the hapless Senator Stevens said (in the same speech) that, “…an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday…”, he was again badly confused. Like the web, email uses the Internet as a transport system to move messages from one computer to another. Email addresses however, don’t look like URLs. This is because email uses a different protocol (the details of which would bore you to tears) from the WWW. It’s enough to know that all email addresses contain an @ symbol, while web addresses never do.

Photo: Matt Britt

Where Are You In This Picture?

In order to display this page, your computer is connected to a network of computers operated by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Your phone company or cable provider may be providing your ISP services or you may be buying them from a local company. Your connection might be made over a standard telephone line, DSL provisioned telephone line, your TV cable or via satellite. In any case, your computer is a node on their network. The computer on their network to which you are connected is called a host. It is the millions of interconnected host computers that make up the Internet.

Your ISP takes care of all the messy details, insuring that all of its computers (including yours) are communicating properly with each other and with the rest of the Internet. They also operate specialized hosts known as servers, which run their email systems, web sites, chat rooms and other online services.

Summing Up

The Internet is a worldwide collection of interconnected computers that can exchange information of many types. Email and the World Wide Web are the most widely used services but there are many others and new ones come along all the time. Software installed on your computer, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Outlook Express and AOL Instant Messenger provide you with the means to interact with these services.

If there are areas of this topic that you would like to know more about, please leave a note in the comments and we will add them to our list of upcoming articles.

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