What is the Internetwork
The Internet appeared in the late 1960s, evolving from the US Department of Defense Arpanet network. Arpanet’s goal was to leverage the power of several large computers and connect universities and research institutes into one network.
In simple words, the Internet is a collection of a large number of computer networks that exchange data with each other. This allows us to use services like email or visit sites.
How the internet works
For the exchange of data, Internet sites are crucial, which can be safely called important components of the World Wide Web. They are distributed worldwide and send data to each other. As a rule, dozens, and sometimes hundreds of service providers (providers) are connected to one Internet site. Inside the network node, data exchange is already taking place among providers. Providers, in turn, provide customers access to the Internet by providing appropriate connections, such as DSL or LTE.
The largest node in the world, if you look at the volume of traffic passing through it, is located in Germany, in Frankfurt, where it is distributed across 19 data centers.
Many companies use their own networks, called intranets, which become part of the Internet with the connection to the provider. While private individuals are mainly only users and recipients of information or services, many companies themselves offer Internet services. In addition to providing general information, they may include online trading, cloud storage, or online reservation services for goods or services.
The actual communication between Internet sites and providers is carried out around the world using fibre optic cables, thanks to which high data transfer speeds are possible. The connection of private homes or companies to the Internet, also sometimes referred to as the “last mile”, is usually realized through a copper cable, radio or fibreglass.
To make everything work smoothly, data exchange is regulated by so-called protocols. For example, using the Internet protocol, it is established that the transmitted data is divided into small packets from the sender, and then transmitted and reassembled from the recipient.
So that the data packet knows where it was sent from and where it should come, each computer participating in the communication receives a unique address – IP – which consists of four blocks of numbers separated by dots. Since hardly anyone can remember the IP addresses of visited websites or other services, there is a domain name system – Domain Name System (DNS). Domains can be used on the Internet instead of IP addresses as more understandable, “talking” names of sites or Internet servers. They are familiar to the user as www addresses or URLs.
What happens when I visit the site?
Calling a website is just one of the myriad processes on the Internet. Let’s look at a simple example of how this works.
1. If you enter a URL in a browser, for example,www.ichip.ru, the request is sent to your provider after pressing Enter. The provider translates the name into the IP address of the target server on which the desired web page is stored.
2. To “transcode” the names of the provider uses one or more special servers. They are called DNS servers, and they have only one task. DNS servers act as a dictionary and store a directory of all Internet sites and their associated IP addresses.
3. When the IP address of the destination server is determined, the request is sent through the Internet sites to the web server on which the page is located. Because the Internet spans the world, there are other ways to transmit data packets. To find the best way, all networks are connected by routers that receive data packets, and then decide where to forward them.
4. When the request reaches its destination, the server responds and returns the contents of the website. Now they should find the path to your computer from which you sent the request.
5. For this chain to work, data packets contain not only information about the recipient, but also the IP address of the sender. The procedure is the same: through the router, the response packets go from network to network and, finally, get to your computer. There they come together and the search website is displayed in the browser.