How does the web work? The internet, I mean. We use it every day, whether it’s to complete schoolwork, play games, or just browse sites. Let’s dive into the history and the development of the internet, and how it works today to help us with lots of our tasks.
Who created the internet? There’s not really a definitive answer to that question. Many people across many years, including scientists and engineers, have worked on this huge project. But the main name that may come to mind is Tim Berners-Lee. He was the official founder of what is known as the World Wide Web in 1989. However, some others were needed to help design TCP/IP protocols (don’t worry, I’ll explain later) and HTTP.
To explain how all this works, I think it’s best to start at your computer. Your computer’s called the client. This is the “receiving” end of the system. You access this through your web browser – likely something like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. On the other hand, the server is the “transmitting” end – it sends all the data to that browser of yours so you can surf the world wide web. The server is just another computer somewhere out there.
Okay, so we’re on a browser (client) now. What can we do? Let’s go to Google. Type in “Google.com” and you get Google, like magic. But what happens under the surface is a bit more complicated. First off, computers can’t interpret URLs (Uniform Resource Locators), so the browser has to send that address (like the “Google.com” I mentioned earlier) to a DNS. DNS stands for Domain Name System. Basically, this is just an interface to translate that URL to an IP address – the IP (Internet Protocol) address of the server. This is exactly how the client accesses the server.
So, we made progress. Now we have a relationship between the client and server. We need a connection. This is where TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) comes in. Put simply, this is just a protocol for connection between two endpoints (or computers). Now that we’re connected (remember, the website is still in its loading stage during all this), we can move on to requesting data.
HTTP. It’s the protocol (yes, lots of protocols) that requests data. You may have heard of it. It stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, or when using HTTPS, that’s HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure. This asks the server through that TCP connection I mentioned to ask for the files for the website requested. The server processes its request, and then sends back a response (typically 200, which is a good thing, but I’ll explain more bad things soon) and now you have the page, and through other, separate requests for images, videos, and other additional elements, you can finally use “Google.com” (or the website of your choice.)
Lastly, as I promised, I’ll tell you about bad responses from the server. As I said, 200 is the good, neutral response, but you may have heard of numbers like 404 or 502. The numbers work on a 4xx or 5xx basis, meaning that that first digit categorizes the response. Client-side errors are 4xx – a common one you’ve likely seen is 404 – which literally means the server can’t find what you requested. Another is 502, which is part of 5xx – server-side issues. This is denoted as Bad Gateway, which means that a server tried to talk to another server to get info from it for you, but got a bad response from the other. Sometimes servers try to talk to each other to get as much information as needed for you for your desired webpage.
So that’s how the internet/web works (internet = hardware, web = software). And with these systems, the world can be connected, people can communicate across any distance, and knowledge and science can explode with new information and connections.
