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How does the Internet Work?

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The internet was initially an electronic document exchange meant for trading data. This was an evolvement from morse code, the telegram, and fax machines. It was not initially meant to replace the printing press, books, television or radio. A web accessible document might be located at an ip address with an obscure document name such as http://54.92.71.83/fsx3491wyxz95tr9135.htm The ip address if permanent could be transmitted via other methods and the document name could be sent in a letter or spelled out via phone call. What differed the document address from a letter is that the htm file could be printed remotely if the other party had a printer, and after the document had been printed, it could be updated. There were no search engines or indexers, and directories were very few and by invite only. The page could also be blanked out and updated during a phone call for remote printing. Some documents contained pictures or graphics which took longer to download. It might take 5 minutes or more to download 2 pictures for remote printing, usually in black and white on document paper. With compression, it became possible to download low resolution pictures and graphics in less than 1-2 minutes. Eventually, it became desirable to expand this system to additional functionality such as easy to remember addresses, the domain name, and an ability to block or allow access to the document by listing or delisting ip addressess. For the most part, these were private communications no different than a phone call, text message, or email. The telecommunications companies could access some of the data but they could often get in trouble for it. They were most interested in getting paid for making the communication channels available, and they were allowed to analyse some limited data such as how much overall data passed through their networks. This allowed them to plan for growth, or expansion. Overall, the internet functions with one way communications, meaning that someone posts something online, and someone else that knows the location of the item can pick it up later. They often had no right to delete or modify, and would notify the poster, that it had been picked up. They could then delete or blank out the file. As time went on, other file formats besides .htm documents that could be accessed and retrieved via the internet included .txt, .jpg, .mp3, and .mp4. Newer file formats such as .png, .m4a, .mov, and .wav came later and all that was needed was the correct file viewer by the person accessing the file. Essentially, there were no username and passwords when the internet first launched.

Adding Additional Functionality

Document and file exchange was nice, and it was viewed similarly to sending a letter or package to an address without the recipient name on the package, and possibly with a delivery code to identify who it belongs to. However, others disagreed and thought it was more similar to dropping off a letter or package at a pickup location with an identifier and providing the intended recipient the location of the letter or package and the correct pickup code. In either case, standardizing these methods, would prepare people for the internet the way it was used at the time.

Listings and Directories

With the popularity of modem management software, it became easier for more people to view and retrieve documents, and some of the documents and files that were available online had a permanency to them and there location identifier was made available to more than one person. After various conversations, it became desirable to have a document that would act like a listing of other interesting files that were available for access over the internet. This resulted in two major developments that were the home page or personal profile, and the online business directory which often included more information than just the name and addresss of the business. For example, low resolution pictures of some items sold at the business, a logo, or pictures of the business managers. Much of the internet began to gain a high level of interactivity, for example, if two people each had a browser open and each person was able to update a webpage, they could type, edit, wait and refresh to establish two way communications that were a little faster than visiting web pages and making phone calls or waiting for letters. The phone could not transmit pictures or graphics, and was voice only which allowed people nearby to overhear conversations. Type, edit, wait, and refresh added a sense of privacy to the communications as well.

Adding higher resolution pictures and video

As internet speeds increased, and availability of faster connectivity became more afforable; it became feasible to consider having high resolution photos and low to medium resolution videos available for pickup. Pictures were often less than 1MB often 128kb was recommended per photo and various photos and graphics rendered well remotely, even for printing at 10-12kb with 5-6kb being the threshold were they started to become blurry. Still, some people were able to transmit very good quality pictures at 1kb in size. This is nearly impossible in modern computing and there was a request to not transmit photos smaller than 3-4 kb unless it was a minuscule thumbnail. Videos were often transmited at 240px or at 240px x 340px. This allowed videos to be available for pickup at less than 3-4MB and often in between 1-2MB or even slightly under 1MB for videos that weren't more than a few seconds. Most videos were not longer than 1 minute and 10 seconds, 25 seconds, or 45 seconds were good numbers for testing or for exchanging videos. Usually, videos weren't kept by both parties due to data storage requirements, the 40 GB hard drive had not yet been released and most people used 40 MB hard drives and 1.44 MB or 3.44 MB portable drives. Not everyone liked all the new computer terminology and many people couldn't understand the difference between discs, disks, drives, storage, or sizes like 5.25" soft or 3.25" hard.

High Speed Internet and Cloud Services

The first cloud services were released around the year 2000 and one of the first applications of cloud services was an online address book that was accessible by sales people. This differed from hosted web pages because there was a higher level of interactivity and dynamic content, where hosted pages were thought to be more static or non-changing. Meaning not changing very often. Internet access increased by more than 10 times the speed going from 56kb per second to anywhere from 768kb per second to as much as 3MB per second. However, most business users opted for no more than 1.5mb per second and home users often selected 768kb per second to 3mb per second. There was not a guaranteed next business day fix with home users, although their connections were usually restored in less than 1 week during a severe outage and rarely did it take a month or more to restore a severed or destroyed connection.

The modern internet

The modern internet is mostly based on content publishing, video streaming, and audio streaming as well personal communications via email, social media, or other applications such as screen sharing, webinar, and video conferencing. Much television and radio programs have migrated to the internet to allow interactivity and watch on demand; however, there are currently talks about migrating back to standard transmission and having social media accounts active during regularly scheduled broadcasts. This will be an important conversation over the next 2 years as it will require architecting the streaming or broadcast design and the decision will be somewhat permanent as the design will likely not be revisited for at least 10 years. Along the way things like SSL, SSH, username/passwords, and 2fa or mfa have been added to increase communication privacy when accessing content over the internet and to prevent telecommunication companies from monitoring what the users are doing on servers they are accessing. While most telecommunication employees are honest and follow rules and guidelines that have been established at work, its often a good practice to put something in place to ensure they don't inadvertently access data they were not allowed to access as this can cause anxiety at work.

The Future of the Internet

The future of the internet is likely strictly as a communication link with the majority of the content being private access and by invite only. This is because published or streamed content requires costs for infrastructure and occasionally for included content. The goal is for most computing to be done offline and for the cloud to be representative of modern and contemporary content that is no older than 2-3 years old unless it is a designated archive such as an online library or museum that has a validated content removal request process. The rest of the cloud will likely be support infrastructure for data that needs to be shared across distributed teams, or accessed throughout the day by workers with changing locations. technical note The internet functions by each browser, known as a client, contacting a server and the server responding that it is available and able to establish a connection, the client then establishes a connection to the server and can begin interactivity. Users connected to a server can interact with each other by having the server forward requests, and computing interactivity, between two users. Multiuser interactivity can also be established in the form of a webinar or online meeting. The server manages the interactivity between users making sure that the requests/responses are sent and received by the correct users who have agreed to communicate with each other over the internet. This is known as a TCP handshake and session management.