The Internet, how does it Really work?

The nuts and bolts of the internet.
Let see what most people see.
The telephone modem and DSL that uses the telephone
line above a high audible signal of say 20,000 cycles.
BTW, 20,000 cps may have been a favorite signal range for Tesla.

Now the signal goes into the computer and we see text and
pictures and video all in digital formats that the computer
puts together. Tesla would have had to use analogue processors
that no one could figure out like the watts-hour meter with the
spinning aluminum disk but society followed Edison and DC
at 5V and perhaps 24V to run the electronics in the digital
computers and the networks.

So text, pictures and video is digitized and sent over copper wires
and the computer sets up the data we see as HTML pages.
There is also a video RAM to screen process.

Not the entire work but perhaps the most obvious.

I have a strong feeling you are really trying to ask, How does the internet provider access the servers that the websites are on.

Im sure it's very complex. But im sure a condensed answer could be given. A simple answer would be nice, something that sums it up fast and easy. For example "Your computer sends a weak signal to the communications tower,the tower then sends a signal to the server,then back to your computer." That is my guess,as to the answer a pro would give. But i "know" nothing at alll about this.

My further feeling is,you are asking this because you want free internet. You want to be smart enough to construct your own way to grab a spot on the internet network. Im sure it is possibe, but light years ahead of the average joe such as myselfs intelligence. So until you get super smart it is just cheaper to pay the 10-50 dollar fee a month,as far as i know a tower costs a few million dollars. And until we find ways to bypass these towers and other devices we are going to have to pay for the towers.


But i have never studied or taken a course on any of this,so if a pro wants to clear this thought up, you may be closer to your answer.

reply to post by crimsonred


It works on an equal basis of Magick and Puppy sacrifice.

I thought everyone knew that?

The internet is of course a complex system, of many collaborating parts, and it'd be easy to get lost in the technical minutia of it's inner workings. Keep in mind that as with all systems of great expanse, humans manage complexity with hierarchical decomposition, e.g. A CEO issues a directive, his trusted lieutenents each apply it to their area of responsibility, and so on for every subordinate down the tree. Complex solutions are also often emergent. Let there be towns A,B,C where roads are planned from AB, and BC. Without any forethought, we now have AC.

Getting back to the internet. Let's ignore details, and approach the problem by construction. For some parties to exchange information they must decide on A) the medium: speech, semaphore flags, electrical signals etc.. B) The protocol. Lets assume you and a friend are each on separate hilltops using flashlights (medium) to exchange morse code messages (protocol). It becomes confusing if you both communicate at once, so you decide to break up the transmission time into quantum's of 5 seconds each in a round-robin fashion. During your turn to communicate, you can send as many messages as you like, as long as you stop in time. Now we have a very simple exchange protocol.

Continuing with this analogy, imagine a scientist and an engineer hear about this communication network, and want to use it to communicate their complex research reports across the different hills. Beforehand (probably at the local pub), they agree to write to each other in English, and without knowing how big their reports will be, they agree to use the sentence THE-END to specify the end of their report. The scientist and engineer have now designed an exchange protocol, at a higher level than the morsecode/flashlight scheme above.

I'm sure you can see where this is going. The scientist and engineer may now overlay their protocol on top of the hilltop morsecode/flashlight protocol. The scientist can simply give his paper to an operator on his hill, who'll start using transmitting it according to the rules above. On the receiving end, it's eventually turned back into an English report. Once the Engineer reads "THE-END" he can tell his flashlight operator he's done receiving this message.

Going further, we might have multiple scientists show up, and they all want to exchange reports with different parties. To deal with this, they might prefix the name of the recipient at the start of each message. As time goes on, the demands on the system will grow and each layer in the network may be improved without consideration to the whole (here is hierarchical decomposition at play). The flashlight operators may want error signals to retransmit signals, while researchers might want a protocol to tell the other to slow down (or speed up) the communication if one side cannot keep up with the other.

The growth of the internet emerged in a very similar way. At one point, all addresses had to be known in advance before communication could take place; when a new party joined the network their address had to be copied to everyone on the net! (now we have DNS). At the high-level end, as you probably know, HTTP existed long before WWW.

My advice is to get the big picture sorted out, and then refine your knowledge in the areas that interest you.