I often get asked difficult questions but this is a cracker: “Steve, how does the Internet work”

Most of the explanations I have read get very technical, fill with jargon very quickly and don’t leave you with a picture of what’s happening.

I think it helps to have something to relate to and I want you to consider first of all what exactly what happens when you post a letter. but please note this relates to surfing the web not email which I will deal with later.

Imagine you write a letter to your insurance company requesting a claim form.
You put the letter in an envelope.
You address the envelope.
You post the envelope.
The postal service reads the address and transports the letter via road, rail etc to it’s destination.
The insurance company opens the envelope.
They read the letter.
They open their filing cabinet and retrieve a claim form.
They put it in an envelope and post back to you using your return address.
You receive the envelope.
You open it and read the information.

With that in the back of your mind here is how the Internet works in a similar way to the mail service.

The Internet consists of millions of computers connected together by a network of cables. This cable network is so complex there is an information pathway from every computer to every other computer on the Internet just as there is a road connecting every house in the country.

Each computer on the network must have a unique address. This is numerical and is called an IP address.

There are two types of computer on the network, Clients and Servers.
The client is you sitting at home requesting information. (like a claim form)
The server is a computer storing websites and delivering pages to clients.
When you sit at home in front of your computer and sign onto the Internet you join this network and your computer is known as a client, you are a customer who requests information from the Internet.

All the information on the Internet is stored on a different type of computer called a server. The server stores web pages and delivers them to clients when requested.