How does the Internet work?
The internet is everywhere, used by 4.35 billion of the 7.72 billion people that inhabit the Earth. That’s about 56% of humanity and arguably it impacts almost everyone on the planet.
But how does it work?
I learned the technical answer to this question through studying for a degree in Software Engineering. Answering this question in laypersons terms, or for the non-specialist is somewhat harder. Some will argue about the simplifications, abstractions and analogies I will use but the intention is to make things a bit clearer for anyone who wants to know.
First of all it would be useful to explain what we mean by the internet. The Internet which used to be spelled with a capital I but is less so these days comes from the term interconnected network, it was capitalised because you can have many interconnect networks but one global Internet (at least the one we think of). That’s networks of computers connected together. They all do different things. Some are big and some are small. Some look after emails, some serve websites and some run applications like the ones you might use at work or that you use on your mobile phone. These computers are called servers. Your mobile phone, laptop and desktop computer are also computers and also sit on the internet.
So we have a bunch of computers, which all do different things on some grand network.
