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...world wide network of computers, what we call the 'Internet'.
The word "Internet" literally means "network of networks." In itself, the
Internet is composed of thousands of smaller local networks scattered throughout
the globe. It connects roughly 15 million users in more than 50 countries a day.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is mostly used on the Internet. The Web refers to a
body of information, while the Internet refers to the physical side of the
global network containing a large amount of cables and computers.
The Internet is a 'packet-switching' computer network. When a person sends a
message over the Internet, it is broken into tiny pieces, called 'packets'.
These packets travel over many different routes between the computer that it is
being sent from to the computer to which it is being sent to. Phone lines,
either fibre-optics or copper wires ones, carry most of the data packets.
Internet computers along the path switch each packet that will take it to its
destination, but no two packets need to follow the same path. The Internet is
designed so that packets always take the best available route at the time they
are travelling. 'Routers' which are boxes of circuit boards and microchips,
which do the essential task of directing and redirecting packets along the
network. Much smaller boxes of circuit boards and microchips called 'modems'
do the task of interpreting between the phone lines and the computer. The
packets are all switched into a destination and reassembled by the destination
computer. Today's Internet contains enough repetitious and interconnected
circuits simply to reroute the data if any portion of the network goes down or
gets overloaded.
The packet-switching nature of the Internet gives it sufficient speed and
flexibility to support real-time communication, such as sending messages to
other people in a chat environment (IRC)....
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