Internet data

introduction

Internet data is the raw stuff that makes up the useful bits of the Internet. It is not a very intuitive description, unless you are the type of person who describes your friends by talking about their atoms.

A more useful division includes Internet resources, the clients and servers that demand and supply these resources and the protocols that describe how everything connects together.

what it is

From a technical point of view, the Internet lets computers share resources. From a political point of view, the Internet is a collection of information belonging to all citizens of the world, available free of charge. All citizens have a right to information and understanding and the Internet is the means of delivery.

The world is full of computers. Many of them are connected together to form networks. Many networks are joined together in a huge connected mass called the Internet. An Internet resource is information contained somewhere in the network. A computer application that requests this resource is called a client and the application that dishes it out is called a server. Connecting everything together is done by following sets of rules called protocols. The most famous is the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) suite.

Internet resources

An Internet resource is information contained somewhere in the network such as a document or a program. Over the 50 years that the Internet has existed, anything that can be represented with a load of ones and zeros stored in a computer memory has been turned into a resource. A resource tends to be words and pictures rather than food and shelter, but who know what the future holds? If you can figure out a way to send a pizza across the Internet you can definately start raking in the cash and leafing through the Ferrari catalog.

The resources available on the Internet have to be found and exchanged using services.

Internet clients and servers

People love sending messages to friends, family and workmates. People love to browse web sites like they love to browse through shopping catalogs and newspapers. Computers can be found in every country in the world and a lot of them have Internet connections, giving about 600 million people Internet access. That is a lot of people demanding a lot of resources.

• Researchers demand information.
• Shopaholics and companies demand commerce.
• Dirty old men demand porn.

The computer applications that fetch these resources are called clients.

This demand for resources led to several years of thrusting sales guys with pony tails coming up with new and interesting ways to supply things using the Internet. The computer programs that supply resources are called servers. Servers offer a service. The most most popular services are e-mail and the WWW (World Wide Web).

The WWW is an effective way of providing access to Internet resources. The Internet is the mighty foundation upon which the great WWW is built. If the Internet is an oak tree, a web site is an acorn. If the tree has 40,000,000 acorns.

Internet protocols

A Sunday service is an act of worship which follows Church protocol. An Internet service is a utility supplied for use by the Internet community which follows an Internet protocol. A protocol is a set of rules that clients and servers must obey. File transfers follow the FTP protocol. Chat follows the IRC protocol. Protocols are the reason the Internet works. If a chat client can follow the IRC protocol then it can happily talk to every single chat server on the Internet.

The applications that really did big things for popularising the Internet must follow protocols. E-mail use protocols such as POP3 and SMTP. The WWW uses HTTP.