topic: What is the Internet?

Tags skill/web_intro
Hard Prerequisites
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  • TECH-BIG-PICTURE: What is software?

    • The Internet is huge and complicated. We won’t be able to tell you absolutely everything about how it works. But we can tell you enough that you understand how to think about it.

    It is a network of computers

    You can think of the Internet as a bunch of computers that can send messages back and forth, and that can execute specific algorithms based on those messages.

    There are a few different things a computer might need to do:

    • process information. For example, it could add up numbers, figure out who to notify, check if a user is authorized to do a thing
    • remember things. For example, if you make a purchase on an online store then the store would need to remember what you ordered so you can get your goodies
    • send messages to other computers (including cell phones)
    • display things on a screen
    • accept input from a user. Eg a person might use a keyboard or mouse to interact with a computer
    • interact with external hardware, for example, a printer or a camera

    It’s worth noting that not all computers can do all of these things. There are computers that exist on the internet that only talk to other computers and have no user interface at all.

    The languages of the web

    Generally, you interact with the Internet using a web browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, or Internet Explorer. There are other ways to interact with the Internet but we’ll focus on web browsers for now.

    A web browser is a piece of software that can display web pages and interact with the internet. When a web browser displays a web page it’s actually executing some code.

    Web browsers all support the following languages:

    • HTML
    • CSS
    • JavaScript

    When you access a website then your web browser will fetch some HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code files from another computer on the Internet, and then it will execute the code in order to draw a “user interface” (UI) for you to interact with.

    Resources

    Give these a read:

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