Were is the Internet?

Were is the internet?

What is the internet?

Is there some central place were it all comes together?

Who own's, controls it?

 

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The internet isn't that centralized. Basically, there are tons of organizations and individuals who have web sites that they place on computers that are connected to other computers that can in turn relay them to even more computers...like yours.

This is, fo course, a super-simplified explaination, and I'm skipping some steps. But I'm sure somebody with a longer attention span than me will come along and give you a better one

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The Internet is a collection many different computers communicating with the TCP and IP protocols along with several more. The computers themselves are seperated between endnodes(your PC along with servers) and routers that forward packets. There is a central cluster of what is known as tier 1 nodes that communicate with very high speed lines but there's no central computer. The Internet is also now comercially owned.

 

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Hmmm...Thanks you all, but, I am still a little confused. At least now I have stuff to research off of.

 

Anyway, do the IP addresses have special areal characteristics?

 

Imagine a bunch of people standing in a room. You're one of them. You can talk to ONLY the people next to you. If you want to talk to someone across the room, you have to pass the message on from one person to the next til it reaches the proper person. Then for them to respond, they do the same back to you. You finally get this system working pretty well and are having a conversation with your friend. A few people (other than your friend) come and go, so sometimes your message goes to different people but it always gets to your friend. Finally at the end of your conversation you wonder...who owns this "system" that we're using to talk to each other? Well at first you might think, well maybe the first guy I always give my message to (the person right next to you) to get to my friend. But he really just passes to the next person. In the end, no one OWNS the system.

The internet is much liek this. You're talking directly to your ISP and your isp is transmitting through other connections to eventually get to www.whatever.com server you're trying to reach. No one really owns it at all. Some message carriers are bigger than others, they do more volume, btu that doesnt mean they own it.

IP addresses do in fact have ranges to a particular area. I don't know all of them, but here's a product I found (googled for) that can tell you where an IP address is from.

http://www.ip2location.com/

-AntonK

 

That was the most beautiful analogy I have ever heard. *sniffle*

 

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994434

pretty pictures showing the connections between computers.

 

Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Internet is. You have to see it for yourself

 

Check this:

http://navigators.com/internet_architecture.html

And this:

http://www.grc.com/dos/TheInternet.htm

That should hook you up.

 

The software doesn't do a very deep trace. The live demo incorrectly stated that I live in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

 

eh. It seems to think that I'm in Wayne PA, when I'm acctually in Conshohoken, PA. I bet the connection to the T1/backbone is in Wayne, about 15 minutes away by car.