From Cables to Websites: A Beginner's Introduction to the Internet

What is the Internet?

The Internet is made up of computers that communicate with each other. For 2 computers to communicate, it needs to be linked physically or wirelessly.

So this is a basic network. Let's say we want to communicate with more computers. We would need more cables and plugs which make this so complex. so we came up with a small computer called a router to obstruct the complexity of cables and plugs. Now to send a message from computer a to computer b, first we need to send the message to the router and then the router is going to send it to the proper computer.

If we want to scale up the number of computers we want to link we can link the router to another router. But when we want to connect our computers with millions of computers, we need to connect our network to ISP(Internet Service Provider). ISPs are companies that have special routers that are linked with other ISP companies around the world. So with the help of ISP companies, we can connect different computers everywhere around the world.

Now another question is how a router knows which computer we want to communicate with. The Internet has some protocols that declare how this connection or communication must be done. When we connect to an ISP, our router gives an IP Address for every device that is connected to the ISP.

An IP address is made of a series of four numbers separated by dots. So when we want to communicate with any device in the network we specify its IP Address and the router is going to send our messages to this address.

Although this is fine for computers, it's hard to remember these addresses. To solve this problem we alias an IP address with a human-readable name called a domain name. For example, when we want to connect to 142.250.190.78, instead of writing these numbers we just type www.google.com.

Now let’s look at the process of connecting to YouTube. YouTube is a website that lives on a computer called a server. The server is a computer that is always connected to the internet. So we want to send a request to this server for website files of youtube and the server is going to send the files with the small units of packets. To send requests and get the packets from the server, we need a web browser like Chrome, Firefox, Mozilla, etc. After we open the browser we just need to give the address of the server to send a request for files. The IP address of YouTube is 142.250.190.78 but we can just type the domain name www.youtube.com. We send a GET request to the server to see YouTube’s homepage. We can send some requests to check if we can get a response from the server using CMD on Windows. Just type “ping” and the website you want to send requests for files. so here we sent 4 packets of messages and the server of the website also sent the 4 packets of the messages back.

Websites are created using languages like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. When we send to request for a website, the server sends these files to our web browser and the outcome of the files is the website we want to see. We are going to learn about these technologies as front-end developers in this channel.

So these were some basic concepts of how the internet works. I just want you to have a basic knowledge of the Internet. Of course, it's not all the concepts of the internet. There are more Protocols besides IP like TCP, FTP, HTTP, etc.

Thanks for reading so far. I hope you've gained some knowledge about internet.