LO and Behold: What the Internet Actually Is
What is the Internet, Anyway?
Ever wonder what actually happens in the split second between typing something into your phone and an answer popping up on your screen? Well, I never really thought about it either, not until I fell into a computational linguistics rabbit hole out of curiosity and realized just how connected the two things are. So here’s my attempt at explaining what the Internet actually is, without just saying it’s the WiFi.
The Internet is not one single thing sitting in some building somewhere, even though that’s an easy way to picture it. Overall, it’s really a network of networks, meaning millions of computers and devices all over the world that have agreed to talk to each other using the same set of rules. Your phone, the computers are your school, servers sitting somewhere in Virginia, even a router on the other side of the world in Tokyo, they’re all speaking a similar enough language that information can move between them almost instantly. Though often used interchangeably, the Web and the Internet are not the same thing. The Web, meaning all the websites you click through in a browser, is really just one thing that runs on top of the Internet, not the Internet itself.
No person invented the Internet, it came together over decades, mostly by accident, the way a lot of big, major innovations tend to do. It goes back all the way to ARPANET, a project the U.S. Department of Defense set up in the late 1960s so multiple university computers could share information even if a part of the system went down. The first message ever sent was in 1969, between UCLA and Stanford, and it was supposed to spell “LOGIN”. However, the system crashed right after the first two letters made it through, so the first thing ever sent and said on the early Internet was “LO.”. Although it may not seem like such a big thing now, it was a major success at the time, even though only two out of five letters were able to go through. The real turning point followed up a few years later, when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf built something called “TCP/IP”, a set of rules that enabled different, incompatible networks to talk and connect with each other. After this , they earned the nickname “The fathers of the Internet”. It wasn’t just computers connected to computers, it was the standardization of a shared language that let all these separate networks merge into one network.
About two decades later, a computer scientist at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, came up with the World Wide Web, a system for linking documents together so that they could be viewed through a browser. This is still what most people picture when they hear the word Internet, even though the Internet itself had already existed for a while by then.
But how does something actually make it to our screen in the half second it takes to load? Your device takes what you’re sending- a search, a message, a video- and breaks it up into little pieces, or packets, assigning to each one an address specifying where it came from and where it’s going, sort of like an envelope for a letter. These packets then travel a variety of different pathways–underground cables, fiber optic lines, WiFi signals, cell towers, satellites–but then they all wind up at their destination where they’re put back together in the correct order.
Of course, before any of that can happen, your device needs to know where to send those packets in the first place. That’s where the Domain Name System (DNS) comes in - think of it as the Internet’s phonebook, translating what you’d actually type (like wikipedia.org) into the sequence of numbers computers use to locate one another
Once that’s sorted out, your browser then takes the reply that the website sent back (also in packets) and reconstructs it into the page you eventually see. The instructions on how these packets are addressed, sent, and reconstructed are called protocols, and TCP/IP is a foundational one upon which many others–like HTTP for webpages and SMTP for email–are built.
This actually became the thing that interested me and inspired me to write this entire piece. Protocols are simply just a shared language. Two machines that have never spoken to each other before are able to transfer information because they already agree on a fixed set of rules for composing, sending, and receiving data. That’s hardly so different from how a conversation only really makes sense when the two conversants already understand the fundamental rules of a language. But what really goes further than that is the fact that the search engines, translation devices, and chatbots that we all use daily are essentially computational linguistic systems running on the infrastructure the Internet provides. Your search query isn’t just sent, it’s parsed by algorithms before it’s looked for what must be vast amounts of indexed language, then retrieved and delivered back to you in packets. The Internet is good at delivering messages, and it’s the linguistics working in those search engines that actually allow us to retrieve the information we need.
So next time someone asks you what the Internet actually is, you can tell them it’s not a cloud, not a physical place, and not even the Web. You can call it an agreement. A shared grammar that lets machines everywhere on the planet understand each other enough to pass a message along and have it show up in one piece on the other end. That same idea, machines agreeing on a shared grammar, is basically the whole reason a field like computational linguistics gets to exist in the first place.
Citations
Internet Society – A Brief History of the Internet Clear overview of ARPANET's origins and the development of TCP/IP. https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
Engineering and Technology History Wiki – Birthplace of the Internet, 1969 Covers the first ARPANET message sent between UCLA and Stanford. https://ethw.org/Milestones:Birthplace_of_the_Internet,_1969
Engineering and Technology History Wiki – TCP Enables the Internet, 1974 Details how Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's TCP/IP paper became the foundation of modern networking. https://ethw.org/Milestones:Transmission_Control_Protocol_(TCP)_Enables_the_Internet,_1974
ICANN – The First Message Transmission Firsthand account of the 1969 ARPANET login attempt. https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-first-message-transmission-29-10-2019-en
W3.org – Information Management: A Proposal Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web. https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
CERN – A Short History of the Web CERN's own account of how the Web was built on top of the Internet. https://home.cern/science/computing/the-birth-of-the-web/short-history-web/
