What’s a cookie? How do I protect myself on the web? And most importantly: What happens if a truck runs over my laptop?
For things you’ve always wanted to know about the web but were afraid to ask, read on.
OPEN BOOK
What about speed? If traffic on the Internet were akin to a stream of water, the Internet’s bandwidth is equivalent to the amount of water that flows through the stream per second. So when you hear engineers talking about bandwidth, what they’re really referring to is the amount of data that can be sent over your Internet connection per second. This is an indication of how fast your connection is. Faster connections are now possible with better physical infrastructure (such as fiber optic cables that can send information close to the speed of light), as well as better ways to encode the information onto the physical medium itself, even on older medium like copper wires.
The Internet is a fascinating and highly technical system, and yet for most of us today, it’s a user-friendly world where we don’t even
think about the wires and equations involved. The Internet is also the backbone that allows the World Wide Web that we know and love to exist: with an Internet connection, we can access an open, ever-growing universe of interlinked web pages and applications. In fact, there are probably as many pages on the web today as there are neurons in your brain, as there are stars in the Milky Way!
In the next two chapters, we’ll take a look at how the web is used today through cloud computing and web apps.
