How the Internet Works

In this App we'll explore how the Internet works, by investigating hardware like routers, switches, and servers and the TCP/IP protocols that define how information moves from computer to computer.

What you'll learn with this App:

• Clients and Servers
• TCP/IP
• Routers and Switches
• Connecting to the Internet

Download this app to understand how the internet works. Your digital literacy course on your finger tip.

What is the Internet? How does it do what it do? And how in the world is it possible to get web pages from around the world in a matter of seconds?

Have you tried using a computer without emailing to communicate with friends, or a web browser to learn about the world or watch funny cat videos? A computer that can't talk to other computers is a lonely device full of information it can't share and without an easy way to find new information. Computers can talk and share things thanks to the incredible network of interconnected computers called the Internet. Thanks to the Internet, exchanging information is done quickly and efficiently. In fact, sharing information between computers is the primary job of the Internet.
However, computers weren't always connected to each other.

In the early days of computing, back in the 1950s, computers were as big as a room and had a lot less power than a mobile phone does today. In those days, one computer couldn't talk to another computer, even if it were in the same room. But in the 1960s, scientists in the United States started working on a way to connect computers around the country.

A government agency called the Advanced Research Project Agency, also known as ARPA, gave lots of money to scientists to find out a way to make this happen. In 1962 the scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came up with an idea for a galactic network of computers. And in the mid-1960s something known as packet switching was invented, which we'll dive into a little more later. In 1969, everything came together and the ARPANET, that's what we called the Internet back then, became a reality.

It wasn't much. A computer at the University of California Los Angeles talked to another computer 562 miles away at Stanford University. The computer at UCLA sent the message log in to the computer at Stanford. Only the letters l and o made it before the entire network crashed, but they didn't let this stop them. In the 1970s and 80s the Internet grew and grew connecting computers from around the world, but it wasn't until 1991 that the web came along riding on the back of the World Wide Network, created by the Internet.

So how exactly does the Internet work?

Good question. Download this app and learn how.

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