well it basically the internet it's a bunch of networks that
are hooked together
computers computers
there are things called hubs and switches
and they run on large cables that hook things together
but the main point is that they can be hooked together
so what's really important
is that
there's an agreement
about how information is carried across it
information is broken up into things that are called packets
and the business of the parts of the internet
are to hand packets
from one part of it to another
so basically if you're sitting at home
if you're sitting home at home with your computer at home
and you're talking to the bbc
news service in england
so that goes through a whole bunch of intermediaries
but the main point is that they have all agreed on what's called the format for how to transmit
these packets
so if i would like to
join the interview
and add a new piece to it all i need to do is agree with this one format about packets
and that's been the critical thing that's made the network successful
since the very very beginning the fact that there is a a standard
that everyone has agreed upon and the other
interesting thing about the pack about the standard is that it's only about how you transmit the
packets
so it's not about
for your part of the internet you're going to transmit uh speech
in a special way
it's that everybody can kind of join the club by just making this agreement about this
one standard that's the critical thing about the internet as i understand it i thought your
your example
of postcards
was great these packets are like uh
dividing up war and peace into twenty five thousand post cards and sending the postcards and one
will go one second and another one will go another second and so on and so forth and at the other end
it all gets put together so it comes out war and peace right "cause these things all have
serial numbers on them and essentially I'm getting them and I'm going to put them together in this order but
remarkable thing is that that the
the network design
was only about postcards
and it's still today only about postcards now in fact the thing now runs so
quickly
just because of moore's law and all of the other advances
that people have used figured out how to use
this same underlying packet passing protocol
for transmitting
telephone calls which essentially
the audio gets written down on postcards dumped into the network the
postcards get delivered very very quickly not all through the same route but they all
have serial numbers on them they reassemble at the other end and you've got skype or one
of these voice over the video might go through different packets in the different routes different
different routes absolutely and they get assembled at the other end you know
in the case of of a telephone call you may lose a few packets but it doesn't really matter because
it's only audio and you wouldn't even notice the difference you know hardly
uh other kinds of documents you know
higher reliability is needed but
so the uh the the the genius of the original network design was to make the fundamental
operation a packet passing a packet from one link to the next
so simple
that creative people
operating at the ends the so-called ends of the network you know
have been able to develop all of these things that were never anticipated in the inter
streaming video and an internet telephony and all of these
all of these applications which in the seventies when the internet
basics were being worked out nobody even imagined
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