What | Why | How the Internet!

The Internet: The Magic Mailbox That Connects Our World

WHAT is the Internet?

Part 1: The Magic Mailbox

Imagine the world is full of houses, and every house (like your home, your school, or your parent’s office) has a magic mailbox.

1. Sending a Letter: You can draw a picture, put it in your magic mailbox, and whisper the address of your friend’s mailbox. Poof! The picture instantly appears in their box, even if they live across the ocean. That’s like sending an email or a message.
2. Getting Information:
   Imagine the internet isn’t one giant library, but a Magical City with millions and millions of different shops, each in its own building.
   When you want something, you just tell your magic mailbox which shop to visit. Zap! Your mailbox travels through the magic threads, goes to the correct shop, and brings back exactly what you asked for.
   • There’s a “Video Shop” (like YouTube) that only has cartoons and movies.
   • There’s an “Information Shop” (like Wikipedia or Google) where you can ask any question.
   • Your school might have its own little shop with pictures and homework.
   • Every company, person, or idea can have its own special shop.
     

The Internet is simply all the magic mailboxes and all the different shops in the Magical City, connected by invisible threads, allowing everyone to visit any shop and share things instantly.

Curiosity Break: Can Someone in the middle Read My Mail?

You might be wondering: if my message is sent in tiny pieces, like postcards travelling through the mail, couldn’t someone in the middle grab a piece and read it?

The answer is yes, they could. That’s why we needed a way to send our postcards in secret, sealed envelopes. This is called Encryption.

Think of encryption as a secret code. Before your computer sends your packets, it locks them in a digital box with a special key. Only the computer on the other end has the matching key to unlock the box. Anyone who intercepts a packet in the middle just sees jumbled nonsense.

How do you know if your connection is using this secret code? Look at the address bar in your web browser.

• If it starts with HTTPS (the ‘S’ stands for ‘Secure’), you’re sending locked boxes. You’ll also see a little padlock icon 🔒, which is your browser’s way of telling you that the secret code is active and your information is safe.

• If it starts with HTTP, you’re sending postcards.

Part 2: How the “Magic” Really Works (The Details)

Now, let’s translate that magic into technology.

• The magic mailboxes are our devices: computers, phones, tablets, and servers.
• The invisible threads are a massive global network of physical cables—fiber-optic wires buried under the ground and laid across ocean floors—along with radio waves for things like Wi-Fi and 4G/5G.
• The picture or letter you send is called data. The internet doesn’t send the whole picture at once. It breaks it into thousands of tiny pieces called packets, like a super-fast jigsaw puzzle. Each packet is given a piece of the address and sent on its way.
• Routers and Switches are the postmen. They are special computers that act as traffic cops, reading the address on each packet and directing it along the fastest path to its destination. The puzzle pieces might even take different routes!
• Once all the packets arrive at the destination mailbox (your friend’s computer), it puts the jigsaw puzzle back together in the correct order to recreate your picture. This all happens in milliseconds.

• The Giant Magic City is a network of powerful computers called servers. When you visit a website, your computer is just asking a server to send it the packets that make up that site.

The single most important fact is this: The internet is not a cloud. It is a physical thing—a massive, interconnected web of wires and computers designed to share information.

Curiosity Break: How Does My Computer Know Any Addresses?

So your computer needs to ask a server for a website. But how does it know the server’s specific, technical address in the first place? You type a simple name, not a complicated code.

This is where three key parts work together like a high-tech delivery service:

1. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator): This is the easy, human-friendly address you type into your browser, like https://whatwhyhowtv.com. Think of it as the name of the shop you want to visit.
2. The IP Address (Internet Protocol Address): Every device connected to the internet, including servers, has a unique IP address. It’s a string of numbers like 172.217.167.78. This is the real address, like the shop’s exact GPS coordinates. It’s powerful for computers but impossible for humans to remember.
3. The DNS (Domain Name System): This is the magic ingredient. The DNS is the internet’s address book. When you type a URL into your browser, your computer first sends a message to a DNS server asking, “Hey, what’s the IP address for whatwhyhowtv.com?” The DNS looks it up in its vast address book and sends the correct IP address back. Only then does your computer know the exact coordinates to connect to and fetch the website.

So, the DNS is the crucial translator between our human language (domain names) and the computer’s language (IP addresses).

WHY Was the Internet Created? (The Unlikely Friendship)

The internet was born from two very different problems in the 1960s, during the Cold War.

1. The Scientists’ Problem (Collaboration): Universities and research labs had giant, room-sized computers that were incredibly expensive. A scientist at a university in California couldn’t use the powerful computer at a university in Massachusetts. They dreamed of a way to connect their computers to share research and computing power. Their goal was open collaboration.
2. The Military’s Problem (Survival): The U.S. military was worried about a nuclear attack. Their communication systems were centralized, meaning if one central point was destroyed, the entire network would go down. They needed a communication network with no central point of failure—one that could survive an attack on any single city. It needed to be decentralized, like a spider’s web, so messages could find a new path if one part was broken.

The WHY is this powerful duality: The internet was created to solve both problems at once. The U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded the project, called ARPANET, to build a decentralized network for military survival that was used by scientists for open collaboration.

HOW Did It Start? (The First “LO”)

The story of “how” is the story of turning this grand idea into a reality, one step at a time.

• The Vision (Early 1960s): A psychologist and computer scientist named J.C.R. Licklider envisioned a “Galactic Network” where people could access data and programs from anywhere. He became the head of ARPA and planted the seeds for ARPANET.
• The Birth (October 29, 1969): This is the exact moment the internet drew its first breath. In a lab at UCLA, a student programmer named Charley Kline sat at a computer and prepared to send the first message to another computer hundreds of miles away at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI).
  • The Goal: He was supposed to type the word “LOGIN“.
  • The Reality: He typed “L“. Over the phone, his colleague at SRI confirmed, “We got the L!” He typed “O“. “We got the O!” Then he typed “G“… and the system crashed.
  • The Fact: The very first message ever sent over the precursor to the internet was “LO“—as in “Lo and behold.” It was an accidental, prophetic, and beautifully human start.
• The Growth (1970s-1980s):
  • Email (1972): An engineer named Ray Tomlinson invented email on the ARPANET. He chose the “@” symbol to separate the user’s name from their host machine, a system we still use today.
  • The Universal Language (1974): Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn developed TCP/IP, the fundamental communication rules for the internet. This was like creating a universal language that all different kinds of computers could speak, allowing separate networks to connect into a true inter-net.
• The Public Explosion (1991): For decades, the internet was a tool for academics and the government. That all changed when a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. He created the three things needed to make the internet easy for anyone to use:
  1. HTML: The language used to build websites.
  2. URL: The address for each website (e.g., http://www.google.com).
  3. HTTP: The protocol for fetching websites.

The World Wide Web isn’t the same as the internet. The Internet is the network of roads; the Web is the collection of cars, shops, and houses accessible via those roads. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention put the power of the internet into everyone’s hands, leading to the world we know today.

Is there a topic you’re curious about? Share your What, Why, and How questions in the comments below—your curiosity could inspire our next exploration. Thanks for joining us!