Introduction to the Internet

The core concept of the Internet is sharing information as easily as possible with those for whom the information is intended. The kind of information is irrelevant. The Internet is simply intended to share information. On one website the information may be a company address, on the next it may be an individual’s ideas, and on the next it may be a collection of videos. Nonetheless, information is what it is all about; hence, we live in the Information Age.

The first thing to do when trying to understand the Internet is to clear your mind of preconceptions. One of the most common misconceptions about the Internet is that it is a single, coherent entity. The Internet is far from singular and coherent. Instead, it is a cacophony of differing technologies congealed together by companies, individuals and groups trying to expand their influence on the world. While there are movements to create standards online, there is no such thing as an Internet standard—because any company or enterprising individual can suddenly come out with new ways to present information or communicate between networks. The Internet evolve largely unsupervised.

In a nutshell, the Internet works by connecting computers together through networks. Depending on the location of the computers in a network, the computers can be called servers, routers, personal computers… even cell phones are computer nodes in the network nowadays. You are likely reading this information from a personal computer… but your computer sent a request via the networks, through various routers, to the server. The server (the computer that stores the information on this page), sent the information back to your computer. Your request was made through clicking a link or typing in the address that led to the current server. Your request included a return address for the information.

It is up to your computer to process the information it receives from the server. Modern computers use a large array of software programs to process the information they receive—the exact programs used are up to computer users. Generally speaking, each type of information is processed by its own type of program—so information that is formatted as HTML is displayed in a browser while information that is formatted as email is displayed in an email client. Music and video are commonly played in media players, RSS feeds in RSS Feed Readers, PDFs in Acrobat Reader, etc.

As each year passes, companies are trying to integrate the processing of these technologies into a seamless experience for the end-user. For example, modern browsers will display multimedia content inside web pages (by embedding media players into browsers), RSS looks more like standard web pages and PDFs can be opened inside browsers.

Even though modern Internet technologies are becoming more integrated, it is still important to understand the different types of information that your computer receives and processes. The next page defines some of the core terms used on the internet.