Internet Technologies - I

Network:

Computer network is a technology that permits us to connect computers to each other, and that is the basic technology behind e commerce. The Internet is a very large system of interconnected computer networks across the globe, and this is used to communicate with each other through e mail, online news, videos, books, games, and almost anything now a days.

World Wide Web or simply Web is a subset of the computers on the Internet, that are connected with one another in a particular fashion or software, using an easy to use standard interface, which makes them and their contents easily accessible in between each other. During 1969, researchers of the Defense Department of the United States of America in the project Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) used a network model to connect 04 computers placed in different areas, and that network was called ARPANET - the Internet was born.
Evolution:

Initially the Defense Department used this common network technology to control weapon systems and transmission of valuable files. Subsequently, e mail was born during 1972 in order to send and receive messages over a network, and the number of users of this technology increased exponentially. During 1980s, use of personal computers increased owing to their ease of use, & availability and the embedded technological support in the PCs for the network technology further increased the number of network users. During 1995, Internet activities were privatized in the USA, and private telecom companies operate the Internet from various Network Access Points, and these firms were called as Network Access Providers, and they then sold the Internet access rights to smaller companies called as Internet Service Providers. Now billions of people in the globe use this amazing but complex, interconnected network of computers, called the Internet, unaware of either its history or technology.

Basic Technology:

LAN or Local Area Network is a network of computers that are located close to each other, and in WAN or Wide Area Network, computers are connected over greater distances.

Internet, which is always designed to resist failure, uses packet switching to move data between minimum two points. On a packet-switched network, data i.e. files and messages are broken down into small parts, called packets, and these packets are labeled electronically with their origins, sequences, and destination addresses. Packets travel from computer to computer along the interconnected networks until they reach their destinations. The destination computer collects the packets and reassembles the original file or message out of the small parts contained in each packet.

The computers through which one packet travels, find out the optimized route for the packet to reach its destination, and hence these computers are called Routers or Gateway Computers, and further, the programs on these Routers that determine the optimum path on which to send each packet contain rules called Routing Algorithms. The programs apply their Routing Algorithms to information they have stored in Routing Tables, and this information includes lists of connections that point to particular groups of other routers, and again, the Routing Algorithm specify which connections are to be used first, and how to handle heavy packet traffic and network congestion. The network devices that move packets from one part of a network to another are called Hubs, Bridges, & Switches.

Internet has Routers that handle packet traffic along the main connecting points of the Internet, and these Routers, (Very large computers which can handle multi-million packets per second) plus the telecom lines connecting them are called Backbone Routers. Every Router connected to the Internet is always designed for multiple packet paths, and as such a certain degree of redundancy is created in the system in order to allow the packets to remain in a moving condition, even though one or more connecting lines or routers or LAN or WAN fail in an Internet system.  

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