Thursday, January 23, 2014
Dentists use the Internet every day to get directions, read reviews, buy things, find a phone number, pay bills and send email. They use it but usually don’t really understand it.
Just as you do not need to understand the intricacies of an auto transmission to drive a car, you do not need to understand the arcane details of the Internet to use it. On the other hand a basic understanding will help you use it more effectively and avoid potential problems.
The Internet is the largest endeavor in human history. It is big, I mean really big. Almost three billion people are online, that is more than one third of the entire population of the planet.
However the Internet is not just people connected through computers, it is also things. Anything with an IP addressable chip is part of the Internet. That includes your phone, your car, household appliances and even some dental equipment. But the Internet is not just the things it is connected to it also is the network. Or even more accurately it is the exchange of data.
The Internet generates 1,800 Terabytes of data every minute. For some perspective the U.S. Library of Congress estimates its entire collection of data is 285 Terabytes. That means every minute of every day we generate the equivalent of eight new Libraries of Congress. That includes three million Google searches each and every minute as well as 168 million emails or more than 240 trillion emails a day. (Most of which seem to end up in my spam folder.)
There are more than one billion Facebook users who generate 700,000 updates per minute. If Facebook was a country it would be the third largest behind only China and India.
We tend to think of the Internet as a network similar to the phone system. That is a hub and spoke arrangement in which we send information from our location to a central command center where it is routed or switched to the intended recipient. The intelligence needed to connect the call is located at the central switch and once the connection is established there is an unbroken link from sender to receiver.
The Internet does not work that way at all. It is more like a tangled web of connections; if the web was created by a deranged spider. There is no symmetry and there is no stable structure. Connections change constantly as data is routed around the system. A map of Internet data movement created this instant would look quite different from a map made an hour from now. When data is transferred it does not pass through a continuous connection all at once like a phone call. The data is broken up into “packets” that are routed separately and travel completely different routes to get to the final address.
The intelligence needed to route an Internet communication is not located at a hub but is at the periphery where the message originates.
How does the system know where to send the packets? It uses established protocols. If you were sending a piece of paper mail there are certain protocols you need to follow. The address is to be written in the middle of the envelope with the zip code last. The stamp goes on the upper right and the return address the upper left. If you do not follow the rules the mail will not go through.
The primary protocols used by the Internet are TCP IP. That stands for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol. Everything connected to the Internet, computers, phones, servers and appliances has an IP (Internet Protocol) Address. An IP address looks something like this; 172.16.254.1. Web pages have IP addresses, but we do not browse the web using numbers we use words. The web page name is called the domain name. The system that translates domain names to IP numbers is called DNS (Domain Name System).
Each domain name must be unique. The organization that manages domain names and assures a stable and secure operation is called ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). ICANN authorizes Domain Name Registrars such as Go Daddy or Network Solutions to register and maintain domain names to the public for a fee.
Websites also use a protocol in order to be usable on any computer in the world using any operating system with any browser. The primary website protocol is HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). If you look at the top of your browser it will identify the page you are viewing using this system. You may see something like this: http://www.emmottontechnology.com/. That is the full website address and it also referred to as the URL (Universal Resource Locator).
The Internet is incomprehensively huge and extraordinarily complex. On the other hand it is so simple to use even a caveman can do it. The future is coming and it will be amazing!