The Internet

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: May 2, 2023.

When you chat to somebody on the Net or send them an e-mail, do you ever stop to
think how many different computers you are using in the process? There's the
computer on your own desk, of course, and another one at the other end where the
other person is sitting, ready to communicate with you. But in between your two
machines, making communication between them possible, there are probably about a
dozen other computers bridging the gap. Collectively, all the world's linked-up
computers are called the Internet. How do they talk to one another? Let's take a
closer look!

Photo: What most of us think of as the Internet—Google, eBay, and all the rest of
it—is actually the World Wide Web. The Internet is the underlying telecommunication
network that makes the Web possible. If you use broadband, your computer is
probably connected to the Internet all the time it's on.

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Contents
What is the Internet?
What does the Internet do?
How does Internet data move?
How packet switching works
What are "clients" and "servers"?
How the Net really works: TCP/IP and DNS
A brief history of the Internet
Find out more
What is the Internet?
Global communication is easy now thanks to an intricately linked worldwide computer
network that we call the Internet. In less than 20 years, the Internet has expanded
to link up around 230 different nations. Even some of the world's poorest
developing nations are now connected.

Bar chart showing total number of countries online between 1988 and 2021

Chart: Countries online: In just over a decade, between 1988 and 2000, virtually
every country in the world went online. Although most countries are now "wired,"
that doesn't mean everyone is online in all those countries, as you can see from
the next chart, below. Source: Redrawn by Explainthatstuff.com using data from
Figure 1.1 "All online, but a big divide", ITU World Telecommunication Development
Report: Access Indicators for the Information Society: Summary, 2003, p.5 (blue
bars, 1998–2003) and Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000–2021 [XLS
spreadsheet format], International Telecommunications Union, December 2022 edition
(2010 and 2021, green bars). Please note that the horizontal (year) axis is not
linear beyond the blue bars.

Lots of people use the word "Internet" to mean going online. Actually, the
"Internet" is nothing more than the basic computer network. Think of it like the
telephone network or the network of highways that criss-cross the world. Telephones
and highways are networks, just like the Internet. The things you say on the
telephone and the traffic that travels down roads run on "top" of the basic
network. In much the same way, things like the World Wide Web (the information
pages we can browse online), instant messaging chat programs, MP3 music
downloading, IPTV (TV streamed over the Internet), and file sharing are all things
that run on top of the basic computer network that we call the Internet.
Information superhighway: The Internet as a highway on which many kinds of traffic
can travel

Artwork: "Information superhighway": The Internet is like a global road network on

which many different kinds of traffic can travel. Much of it seems one way—from
distant computers (servers) into your home—but in reality the traffic is always
two-way.

The Internet is a collection of standalone computers (and computer networks in

companies, schools, and colleges) all loosely linked together, mostly using the
telephone network. The connections between the computers are a mixture of old-
fashioned copper cables, fiber-optic cables (which send messages in pulses of
light), wireless radio connections (which transmit information by radio. waves),
and satellite links.

Bar chart comparing Internet access across different world regions and socio-
economic groupings in 2015.

Chart: Internet use around the world: This chart compares the estimated percentage
of households with Internet access for different world regions and economic
groupings. For each region or grouping, the lighter bar on the left shows the
percentage for 2015, while the darker bar shows 2019. Although there have clearly
been dramatic improvements in all regions, there are still great disparities
between the "richer" nations and the "poorer" ones. The world average, shown by the
black-outlined orange center bars, is still only 57 out of 100 (just over half).
Not surprisingly, richer nations are well to the left of the average and poorer
ones well to the right. Source: Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000–
2019 [XLS spreadsheet format], International Telecommunications Union, 2020.

What does the Internet do?

The Internet has one very simple job: to move computerized information (known as
data) from one place to another. That's it! The machines that make up the Internet
treat all the information they handle in exactly the same way. In this respect, the
Internet works a bit like the postal service. Letters are simply passed from one
place to another, no matter who they are from or what messages they contain. The
job of the mail service is to move letters from place to place, not to worry about
why people are writing letters in the first place; the same applies to the
Internet.

Just like the mail service, the Internet's simplicity means it can handle many
different kinds of information helping people to do many different jobs. It's not
specialized to handle emails, Web pages, chat messages, or anything else: all
information is handled equally and passed on in exactly the same way. Because the
Internet is so simply designed, people can easily use it to run new "applications"—
new things that run on top of the basic computer network. That's why, when two
European inventors developed Skype, a way of making telephone calls over the Net,
they just had to write a program that could turn speech into Internet data and back
again. No-one had to rebuild the entire Internet to make Skype possible.

Ethernet cable

Photo: The Internet is really nothing more than a load of wires—metal wires, fiber-
optic cables, and "wireless" wires (radio waves ferrying the same sort of data that
wires would carry). Much of the Internet's traffic moves along ethernet networking
cables like this one.

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How does Internet data move?

Circuit switching
Much of the Internet runs on the ordinary public telephone network—but there's a
big difference between how a telephone call works and how the Internet carries
data. If you ring a friend, your telephone opens a direct connection (or circuit)
between your home and theirs. If you had a big map of the worldwide telephone
system (and it would be a really big map!), you could theoretically mark a direct
line, running along lots of miles of cable, all the way from your phone to the
phone in your friend's house. For as long as you're on the phone, that circuit
stays permanently open between your two phones. This way of linking phones together
is called circuit switching. In the old days, when you made a call, someone sitting
at a "switchboard" (literally, a board made of wood with wires and sockets all over
it) pulled wires in and out to make a temporary circuits that connected one home to
another. Now the circuit switching is done automatically by an electronic telephone
exchange.

If you think about it, circuit switching is a really inefficient way to use a
network. All the time you're connected to your friend's house, no-one else can get
through to either of you by phone. (Imagine being on your computer, typing an email
for an hour or more—and no-one being able to email you while you were doing so.)
Suppose you talk very slowly on the phone, leave long gaps of silence, or go off to
make a cup of coffee. Even though you're not actually sending information down the
line, the circuit is still connected—and still blocking other people from using it.

Packet switching
The Internet could, theoretically, work by circuit switching—and some parts of it
still do. If you have a traditional "dialup" connection to the Net (where your
computer dials a telephone number to reach your Internet service provider in what's
effectively an ordinary phone call), you're using circuit switching to go online.
You'll know how maddeningly inefficient this can be. No-one can phone you while
you're online; you'll be billed for every second you stay on the Net; and your Net
connection will work relatively slowly.

Most data moves over the Internet in a completely different way called packet
switching. Suppose you send an email to someone in China. Instead of opening up a
long and convoluted circuit between your home and China and sending your email down
it all in one go, the email is broken up into tiny pieces called packets. Each one
is tagged with its ultimate destination and allowed to travel separately. In
theory, all the packets could travel by totally different routes. When they reach
their ultimate destination, they are reassembled to make an email again.

Packet switching is much more efficient than circuit switching. You don't have to
have a permanent connection between the two places that are communicating, for a
start, so you're not blocking an entire chunk of the network each time you send a
message. Many people can use the network at the same time and since the packets can
flow by many different routes, depending on which ones are quietest or busiest, the
whole network is used more evenly—which makes for quicker and more efficient
communication all round.

How packet switching works

What is circuit switching?
Simple artwork showing how circuit switching works

Picture: Circuit switching is like moving your house slowly, all in one go, along a
fixed route between two places.

Suppose you want to move home from the United States to Africa and you decide to
take your whole house with you—not just the contents, but the building too! Imagine
the nightmare of trying to haul a house from one side of the world to the other.
You'd need to plan a route very carefully in advance. You'd need roads to be closed
so your house could squeeze down them on the back of a gigantic truck. You'd also
need to book a special ship to cross the ocean. The whole thing would be slow and
difficult and the slightest problem en-route could slow you down for days. You'd
also be slowing down all the other people trying to travel at the same time.
Circuit switching is a bit like this. It's how a phone call works.

What is packet switching?

Simple artwork showing how packet switching works

Picture: Packet switching is like breaking your house into lots of bits and mailing
them in separate packets. Because the pieces travel separately, in parallel, they
usually go more quickly and make better overall use of the network.

Is there a better way? Well, what if you dismantled your home instead, numbered all
the bricks, put each one in an envelope, and mailed them separately to Africa? All
those bricks could travel by separate routes. Some might go by ship; some might go
by air. Some might travel quickly; others slowly. But you don't actually care. All
that matters to you is that the bricks arrive at the other end, one way or another.
Then you can simply put them back together again to recreate your house. Mailing
the bricks wouldn't stop other people mailing things and wouldn't clog up the
roads, seas, or airways. Because the bricks could be traveling "in parallel," over
many separate routes at the same time, they'd probably arrive much quicker. This is
how packet switching works. When you send an email or browse the Web, the data you
send is split up into lots of packets that travel separately over the Internet.

What are "clients" and "servers"?

There are hundreds of millions of computers on the Net, but they don't all do
exactly the same thing. Some of them are like electronic filing cabinets that
simply store information and pass it on when requested. These machines are called
servers. Machines that hold ordinary documents are called file servers; ones that
hold people's mail are called mail servers; and the ones that hold Web pages are
Web servers. There are tens of millions of servers on the Internet.

A computer that gets information from a server is called a client. When your
computer connects over the Internet to a mail server at your ISP (Internet Service
Provider) so you can read your messages, your computer is the client and the ISP
computer is the server. There are far more clients on the Internet than servers—
billions of them, if you count smartphones!

Client-server compared with peer-to-peer (P2P)

Artwork: Ordinary computers ("clients"), like the one you're using right now,
communicate with more powerful ones ("servers") that hold things like web pages,
emails, and so on. This is called client-server computing. Clients can also
communicate with other clients. This is called peer-to-peer (P2P) communication.

When two computers on the Internet swap information back and forth on a more-or-
less equal basis, they are known as peers. If you use an instant messaging program
to chat to a friend, and you start swapping party photos back and forth, you're
taking part in what's called peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. In P2P, the machines
involved sometimes act as clients and sometimes as servers. For example, if you
send a photo to your friend, your computer is the server (supplying the photo) and
the friend's computer is the client (accessing the photo). If your friend sends you
a photo in return, the two computers swap over roles.

Apart from clients and servers, the Internet is also made up of intermediate
computers called routers, whose job is really just to make connections between
different systems. If you have several computers at home or school, you probably
have a single router that connects them all to the Internet. The router is like the
mailbox on the end of your street: it's your single point of entry to the worldwide
network.

How the Net really works: TCP/IP and DNS

The real Internet doesn't involve moving home with the help of envelopes—and the
information that flows back and forth can't be controlled by people like you or me.
That's probably just as well given how much data flows over the Net each day—
roughly 300–400 billion emails and a huge amount of traffic downloaded from the
world's 2 billion websites by its 5 billion users. If everything is sent by packet-
sharing, and no-one really controls it, how does that vast mass of data ever reach
its destination without getting lost?

The answer is called TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control

Protocol/Internet Protocol. It's the Internet's fundamental "control system" and
it's really two systems in one. In the computer world, a "protocol" is simply a
standard way of doing things—a tried and trusted method that everybody follows to
ensure things get done properly. So what do TCP and IP actually do?

Internet Protocol (IP) is simply the Internet's addressing system. All the machines
on the Internet—yours, mine, and everyone else's—are identified by an Internet
Protocol (IP) address that takes the form of a series of digits separated by dots
or colons. If all the machines have numeric addresses, every machine knows exactly
how (and where) to contact every other machine. When it comes to websites, we
usually refer to them by easy-to-remember names (like www.explainthatstuff.com)
rather than their actual IP addresses—and there's a relatively simple system called
DNS (Domain Name System) that enables a computer to look up the IP address for any
given website. In the original version of IP, known as IPv4, addresses consisted of
four pairs of digits, such as 12.34.56.78 or 123.255.212.55, but the rapid growth
in Internet use meant that all possible addresses were used up by January 2011.
That has prompted the introduction of a new IP system with more addresses, which is
known as IPv6, where each address is much longer and looks something like this:
123a:b716:7291:0da2:912c:0321:0ffe:1da2.

The other part of the control system, Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), sorts
out how packets of data move back and forth between one computer (in other words,
one IP address) and another. It's TCP that figures out how to get the data from the
source to the destination, arranging for it to be broken into packets, transmitted,
resent if they get lost, and reassembled into the correct order at the other end.

A brief history of the Internet

Precursors
1844: Samuel Morse transmits the first electric telegraph message, eventually
making it possible for people to send messages around the world in a matter of
minutes.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell (and various rivals) develop the telephone.
1940: George Stibitz accesses a computer in New York using a teletype (remote
terminal) in New Hampshire, connected over a telephone line.
1945: Vannevar Bush, a US government scientist, publishes a paper called As We May
Think, anticipating the development of the World Wide Web by half a century.
1958: Modern modems are developed at Bell Labs. Within a few years, AT&T and Bell
begin selling them commercially for use on the public telephone system.
1960s: Preparing for a global network
1964: Paul Baran, a researcher at RAND, invents the basic concept of computers
communicating by sending "message blocks" (small packets of data); Welsh physicist
Donald Davies has a very similar idea and coins the name "packet switching," which
sticks.
1963: J.C.R. Licklider envisages a network that can link people and user-friendly
computers together.
1964: Larry Roberts, a US computer scientist, experiments with connecting computers
over long distances.
1960s: Ted Nelson invents hypertext, a way of linking together separate documents
that eventually becomes a key part of the World Wide Web.
1966: Inspired by the work of Licklider, Bob Taylor of the US government's Advanced
Research Projects Agency (ARPA) hires Larry Roberts to begin developing a national
computer network.
1969: The ARPANET computer network is launched, initially linking together four
scientific institutions in California and Utah.
1970s: The modern Internet appears
1971: Ray Tomlinson sends the first email, introducing the @ sign as a way of
separating a user's name from the name of the computer where their mail is stored.
1973: Bob Metcalfe invents Ethernet, a convenient way of linking computers and
peripherals (things like printers) on a local network.
1974: Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn write an influential paper describing how computers
linked on a network they called an "internet" could send messages via packet
switching, using a protocol (set of formal rules) called TCP (Transmission Control
Protocol).
1978: TCP is improved by adding the concept of computer addresses (Internet
Protocol or IP addresses) to which Internet traffic can be routed. This lays the
foundation of TCP/IP, the basis of the modern Internet.
1978: Ward Christensen sets up Computerized Bulletin Board System (a forerunner of
topic-based Internet forums, groups, and chat rooms) so computer hobbyists can swap
information.
1980s: The Internet gives birth to the Web
1983: TCP/IP is officially adopted as the standard way in which Internet computers
will communicate.
1982–1984: DNS (Domain Name System) is developed, allowing people to refer to
unfriendly IP addresses (12.34.56.78) with friendly and memorable names (like
google.com).
1986: The US National Science Foundation (NSF) creates its own network, NSFnet,
allowing universities to piggyback onto the ARPANET's growing infrastructure.
1988: Finnish computer scientist Jarkko Oikarinen invents IRC (Internet Relay
Chat), which allows people to create "rooms" where they can talk about topics in
real-time with like-minded online friends.
1989: The Peapod grocery store pioneers online grocery shopping and e-commerce.
1989: Tim Berners-Lee invents the World Wide Web at CERN, the European particle
physics laboratory in Switzerland. It owes a considerable debt to the earlier work
of Ted Nelson and Vannevar Bush.
1990s: The Web takes off
1993: Marc Andreessen writes Mosaic, the first user-friendly web browser, which
later evolves into Netscape and Mozilla.
1993: Oliver McBryan develops the World Wide Web Worm, one of the first search
engines.
1994: People soon find they need help navigating the fast-growing World Wide Web.
Brian Pinkerton writes WebCrawler, a more sophisticated search engine and Jerry
Yang and David Filo launch Yahoo!, a directory of websites organized in an easy-to-
use, tree-like hierarchy.
1995: E-commerce properly begins when Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.com and Pierre
Omidyar sets up eBay.
1996: ICQ becomes the first user-friendly instant messaging (IM) system on the
Internet.
1997: Jorn Barger publishes the first blog (web-log).
1998: Larry Page and Sergey Brin develop a search engine called BackRub that they
quickly decide to rename Google.
1999: Kevin Ashton conceives the idea that everyday objects, and not just
computers, could be part of the Internet. This idea is now known as the Internet of
Things.
2000s: Internet and Web for all
2003: Virtually every country in the world is now connected to the Internet.
2004: Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg revolutionizes social networking with
Facebook, an easy-to-use website that connects people with their friends.
2006: Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams found Twitter, an even simpler "microblogging"
site where people share their thoughts and observations in off-the-cuff, 140-
character status messages.
2017: Russian president Vladimir Putin approves a plan to create a private
alternative to the Internet to counter the historic dominance of the (traditional)
Internet by the United States.