How The Internet Works

What is the internet?

The Internet is the world’s largest wide area network. It is made up of millions of smaller networks. Everything that you find online, including web pages, email, instant messaging, FTP sites, online games, and more, comes to you through the Internet.It is the Largest Wan ever. The internet is used by everyone. Over 2 billion users.The Internet is rooted in the early 1960s, in a US government research project run by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). The researchers had three computers, two in California and one in Boston, and they wanted to be able to access each of them, regardless of their location. Their work to make this happen led to the idea that would become the Internet.

What is a protocol?

Rules for how computers in a network communicate with each other. These rules are called network protocols. Protocols control or enable the connection, communication, and data transfer between two computing endpoints. The first network protocol was established on the ARPANET network in 1969. By 1971 the system was being used for email, and in 1973 file transfers via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) began. By 1981 there were 213 computers connected to the network.

What is DNS?

DNS is like a phone book for the Internet; it looks up a host name and returns an IP address, or vice versa. When you type www.cnn.com into a web browser, the application has to go to a DNS server to find the IP address associated with www.cnn.com. Each part of the Internet has DNS servers, and each computer is configured to query a specific DNS server. Usually home computers are configured to query their ISP’s name server or a free DNS name server. Applications send a request called a DNS lookup to the computer’s DNS server. This DNS server only has information about a limited number of host names and IP address.