The Internet in Plain Old English
There seems to be a strange misinterpretation even among many web professionals about the distinction between the Internet and the World Wide Web so I thought it might be prudent to post an explanation that doesn’t involve too much brain matter. Yes the Internet in plain old english.
In plain old english the Internet is a physical structure which interconnects computers around the world. The Internet is a mesh of all the smaller public computer networks in the world which link together – domestic, academic, business and government.The Internet is not the World Wide Web.
The Internet is made up of clients (smaller computers which require resources) and servers (larger computers which contain resources) connected together by routers and switches (small computers that decide the most efficient path to a destination). The messages are sent in packets (small chunks of data) that are packed at the sender like a russian doll and unpacked at the destination in the same way to become whole messages again. Does that make sense? Imagine a computer in America, one in Australia and another in Israel and Japan. Picture lines between these computers with smart little computers (routers and switches) along the pathways that try to work out the best path to the destination. The messages are broken up into little pieces and they get put back together at the other end.
The Internet works by using the Domain Name System (DNS) to allocate individual names to computers using the Internet. This DNS naming means your computer name made up of numbers is translated to a standard address that humans can understand. This is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Using DNS the association between the numbers and the human readable names is maintained – thus all the computers know where a certain resource can be found on the Internet.
The Internet is a lot more complicated than this explanation but you can see by this basic overview that it is a mechanism – hardware and software – that enables applications to communicate effectively on a global scale in a network of smaller networks. The Internet was invented long before the World Wide Web (one of the services which run on it).
While the Internet and the World Wide Web are more and more commonly used interchangably its not correct and leads to some conceptual misinterpretations. That being said, the computer on your desk isn’t a mysterious black box of wonder either – its a processor and various memories pushing data bits around pathways (called buses). But that’s another story. I hope this explanation in plain english is helpful because even professional web developers don’t all know the difference.
Note: That’s probably why some people crack up laughing when you tell them you have the Internet at home.
