Internet 101

If you turn on the computer and fire up Google Chrome, Gmail, Facebook and a bunch of other websites that help us with our daily lives only to not get connected, I'm sure a few choice words exit your mouth as they do for many of us.  

In recapping the first week of my MKT 595: Internet and Interactive Marketing class we started at the very beginning - How the Internet Works.  For most people who are connected online they could not even begin to explain how it works.  I don't necessarily have much more of an understanding than most but here's a little tutorial you can throw this around at a cocktail party and sound like an IT wiz.  

Internet: A global network that links computers through an IP address. 

IP address: A unique identifier that links one computer to the other on the Internet (network).  

Domain Name Service: The process of translating IP addresses to domain names.  As humans we'd much rather remember Facebook.com than a bunch of numbers.  Telephone numbers are hard enough these days.  

World Wide Web: The WWW is an application that actually lays on top of the Internet and is a series of interlinked documents which we better refer to them as web pages.  

Web Servers: Servers that host web pages.

Web Browser: Software that is used to view web pages like Microsoft IE, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.  

This may solve your next Internet crisis but hopefully makes you feel a little more aware of how things work in our ever connected online lives.