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A Succinct Definition of the Internet?
magnamous asks: "Ever since Senator Ted Stevens used the phrase 'series of tubes' to describe his understanding of the Internet, I've noticed several stories and comments referencing how silly that is. Although I agree that that description is rather silly, each time I've found myself trying to come up with a -succinct layman's definition- of what the Internet is, and I come up short. Wikipedia has a gargantuan page describing the Internet, and Google's definitions offer pretty good descriptions of what the Internet is in a functional sense (with some throwing in terms that the layman wouldn't understand, or take the time to understand), but not really a good description of what it -is- in the physical sense that I think Sen. Stevens was trying to get at. What are your suggestions for a succinct layman's definition of the Internet?"
I know some would say that laypeople should take the time to learn the technical, more accurate meaning of what the Internet is. The problem is that they won't. We all know laypeople. I live with two of them. When you start talking about 'TCP/IP' or 'DNS', or if you get far enough to start describing those terms, their eyes glaze over. That's what makes them laypeople — they don't care about the subject enough to learn about it in-depth; if they did, they'd be computer enthusiasts. So please keep in mind that, in order for this discussion to be useful, 'succinct' and 'layman' are essential parts to any definition of the Internet given here. Also keep in mind that 'succinct' doesn't necessarily mean one sentence; a relatively short paragraph would be fine, too — the main goal is to come up with something that physically describes the Internet in a way which laypeople can actually understand."
The internet is a collection of ideas, presented to users in a vast array of increasingly easier to use methods, by a plethora of individuals, groups, small businesses, corporations and governments, for multiple purposes involving money, fact and/or opinion. No single group of aligned parties shall control the Internet, or the Internet shall be no longer valid.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
How about "bunch of computers connected using phone lines"?
Maybe just call it "series of tubes"? Stevens is pretty layman, so I wouldn't be surprised most people can understand better with description like that.
We used to call aeroplanes "big metal birds" and people instantly associate it with "big flying things" in a physical sense. Later on, aeroplane becomes a common term and no more layman terms are needed.
So in the future the term "internet" would be enough for everyone, but right now, "series of tubes" pretty much describes its physical structure.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
It's pretty much a telephone system, except that it's computers calling other computers. Most people have a basic understanding of the workings -- if not the mechanics -- of a phone system.
licet differant, aequabitur
Succinct enough for you?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It's not a "series of tubes". God, what a stupid definition.
It's an array of pipes!
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Just send them this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1n4fDgmrF3o
Shockwave Flash movies are the greatest thing to happen to non-sequitur humor since Japan.
The Internet is a bunch of electronics which let any connected computer communicate with any other connected computer. It is useful because many of those computers provide information and services on request.
That's it. The Internet is not wires, fiber-optic cables, http, TCP/IP, or anything like that, because those are technical details which have changed in the past and may change in the future.
I thougth the "tubes" analogy was fine, myself. I don't know why people got on his case about it.
Usually when i try to describe the internet I liken it to the mail system. You have "envelopes" that are addressed to someplace. Then they get picked up by someone, thrown on a truck, routed etc. It's basically the same thing that happens with packets as they get routed.
As far as the WWW goes, that's a different and distinct thing that's built on top of the Internet. I don't think it's really that hard to explain. It's just like a library or newspaper basically.
If you want to get into the finer social implications.. then that's another story, but the basics, I think, are easily understood in terms of familiar concepts.
"Series of tubes" is a perfectly cromulent expression.
This is how I describe it to people.
There are a bunch of computers - big and small, like the one on your desk and big ones that live in big rooms full of other computers. In between them is a lot of fiber optic cable. And organizing all the fiber optic cable is a set of junctions, like you would have in a model train set, only functioning at a bazillion miles an hour.
Each little bit of data that you ask for, and the request itself, is like a little train, going down a track. It keeps hitting these junctions that read where it is going and shunt it onto the right cable to get there. When it gets there, in all likelihood the computer at that end sends something back, which travels the same way.
So when you come up with a good definition, please contribute and edit the Simple English page.
Imagine a giant radish, like a planet sized radish. Now imagine that there's a bunny hopping to the radish, and it takes a bite out of it. But the bunny spits out that bite and kind of smears it back in place on the radish with a paw. Then it rains.
That's the internet.
Comment of the year
Physical: The Internet is a collection of computers that send each other messages, along with the equipment that carries the messages. Social: The Internet is a virtual community where people can get together, do business, and share ideas and culture. Functional: The Internet is a way you can use computers to send family, friends, and co-workers letters, pictures, and movies. Technical: The Internet is a collection of computers following protocols conforming to the OSI model that enable computers to communicate with each other. ...
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Most of the internet is a fluffy cloud, with little lightning bolts connecting it to little brick walls with holes through them, behind which are lots of little white boxes with numbers. The rest of the internet is a series of PowerPoint slides labled "ROI" and "incredible growth" and "first mover."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Internet (noun): an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities around the world.
I think this is a servicable, sucinct, definition. Of course, I would have split it in two as follows...
Internet (proper noun): the global internetwork based on the Internet Protocol.
internetwork (noun): an electronic communications network that connects computer networks and organizational computer facilities.
but I'm a bit pedantic.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material." I think Senator Stevens got a bad rap for that one. Techies often talk about "fat pipes" when they mean fast network connections, and evidently the image stuck in Stevens' head. I'd give him the benefit of assuming he was speaking metaphorically, since he must know that there's no actual tube connected to his computer.
I know people joke about the series of tubes thing, but it seems to me that was the least wrong part of Stevens' totally confused statement.
Politics aside, I don't really see the technical problem with comparing the Internet to a series of tubes. Tubes have a predictable bandwidth, i.e. you can only pump a certain amount of liquid or gas through them in a given time; and they have predictable latency, i.e. you push something in one end, it takes some time to come out the other end. So far, a lot like a network connection.
What the "series of tubes" doesn't capture is the packetized nature of the internet, or the complexities of routing, and other such details. However, at the abstraction level at which Stevens was talking, I'm not sure any of that matters. If you're talking about things like "clogging up the Internet", it's true that that can happen, for the same reasons that tubes can get clogged: if you try to put too much stuff in, at too many entry points, your backbone tubes are going to become a bottleneck. So the metaphor holds up in this case, and predicts behavior that you can see on actual networks.
The fact that the email problem Stevens was describing had nothing to do with Internet congestion is a separate issue, which doesn't actually detract from "series of tubes" as a metaphor for the Internet at a certain level of abstraction.
I'd love to hear reasons why I'm wrong. Other than "Ignore the facts, we must excoriate politicians who are against network neutrality!" Ridiculing a perfectly good metaphor just because you don't agree with the guy using it is not the way to sensible public policy, although I admit it does seem to be how politics is often conducted.
A friend of mine managed to cover this in four words over a decade ago:
"Many computers--all friends."
... but you may find it an inconvenient truth.
I agree with the bad rap on the tube thing, but I would fail him in Networking 101 for "an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially".
Internet is for porn - there, fixed for you.
You can't handle the truth.
So the internet like a hookah through which you can smoke data from all over the planet man. That's totally far out.
> I don't know why people got on his case about it.
Because of the rest of the description wherein he believed that other people downloading movies somewhere were clogging the pipes and kept his "internet" (email) from arriving on time. If you watch it in context, it's clear that he doesn't know how the internet works. As far as anyone can tell, he believed the pipes are, well, literal pipes with "internets" flowing through them. Did you ever see the full speech? Only the first line gets widely quoted any more, but the Daily Show showed the whole thing. It was ridiculous.
Anyhow, the most succinct definition of "internet" I can give you is just one word: here.
Or if you need something with more technical accuracy, it's the giant network computers get connected to because almost everyone else is also connected to it. All the internet providers link to other providers, who eventually link with everyone else, because there's not much value in having a network isolated from the rest of the world in most cases.
And that's why we still have spam, because SMTP thinks all computers are our friends.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Individual computers are buildings -- homes, business, etc. The roads connecting those buildings are the wires and cables that carry data around the Internet. Each building (computer) knows how to directly communicate with some or all of its neighbors (you can walk next door) but data needs to travel on the roads to communicate with more distant buildings (computers).
There are lots of different types of vehicles (protocols) that are used to send data along the Internet -- regular cars (HTTP), buses (FTP), trucks (other protocols), etc. Often computers will send data piecemeal in multiple vehicles. These vehicles often need to get directions (routing) at various buildings (computers) to reach their destinations. When one road is blocked (network downtime) the vehicles with the data can find their way along other routes to reach their destinations, or the source of the data will write the stuck vehicle(s) as lost and resend them on new vehicles.
The Internet is no single piece of technology. It is an agreement about how to have different networks and technologies talk to each other and work together.
It's a bit heady, maybe even a bit airy-fairy, but the essay captures some of the essence of why the Internet is different and proves to be so valuable.
I also think it's a good lead in for discussing why net neutrality is essential. A non-neutral policy essentially throws away the agreement, likely fracturing the network into pieces between which there'd be ongoing maybe-we'll-talk-maybe-we-won't negotiations. Pieces get balkanized, even walled off, and resources that used to go to developing services that anyone who was part of the agreement could use now have to be devoted to the negotiation.
With the Internet agreement, you don't have to concentrate on that. Just follow the guidelines on how to talk to one edge of the net, and you can talk to the whole world. That's the revolution.
Tweet, tweet.
IN fact that's where the terminology game from. Why do you think a bunch of data is called a packet? Its cause packets are what you send through the mail, at least in the 50's thats what they were called (nowadays everyting is a "package" but that's more because the term "packet" is now more widely used electronically.
If you want to explain the internet to people, use the analogies that the original terms were modeled after!
Server - A server is like a waiter or customer service person. You ask it for something and get get sir for you. The ony difference is the server is a computer that is handling the requests.
Client - A client is like a patron or business client; he is the person asking the server for things. In the case of the internet the client is another computer, who is asking the server for something.
Packet - A bundle of information, with an address, that needs to be delivered. The packet could be going from the client to the server, in which case it is how the client is asking the server for something. If it is going from the server to the client, it is the information the server asked for.
Server, Client, Packet. Three simple words any layperson SHOULD ALREADY KNOW. It's not really hard to explain.
A highway hundreds of lanes wide. Most with pitfalls for potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member vigilante posses with nuclear weapons. A minimum of 237 on ramps at every intersection.
No signs. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions.
Ad hoc traffic laws. Some lanes would vote to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a capital offense on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just shoot you without a trial for talking on a car phone.
AOL would be a giant diesel-smoking bus with hundreds of ebola victims on board throwing dead wombats and rotten cabbage at the other cars, most of which have been assembled at home from kits. Some are built around 2.5 horsepower lawn mower engines with a top speed of nine miles an hour. Others burn nitroglycerin and idle at 120.
No license plates. World War II bomber nose art instead. Terrifying paintings of huge teeth or vampire eagles. Bumper mounted machine guns. Flip somebody the finger on this highway and get a white phosphorus grenade up your tailpipe. Flatbed trucks cruise around with anti-aircraft missile batteries to shoot down the traffic helicopter. Little kids on tricycles with squirt guns filled with hydrochloric acid switch lanes without warning.
No off ramps. None.
Author (maybe, it's hard to track down sources on the Net): Jim Wiedman
Internet is a collection of independent communication networks, connected to form a much bigger communication network through mutually shared collaborative connection agreements; a General Purpose Communication System.
People describing IP, TCP, Web, Usenet, VOIP all miss out on what the internet REALLY is, communication. The means, methods, routing and all of that is what makes it work, but not the purpose. Purpose is ONLY communication, nothing more, nothing less.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Does the internet exist if nobody is connected?
Many "laypeople" don't know what a "network" is. When they do start to understand that two computers can talk to eachother, they don't understand what part a "web browser" plays.
Some people still think "Internet Explorer" is the internet. You and I know that's not true. You and I know that HTML and HTTP are only a tiny part of what is now the internet. Lots of people don't.
Here are 10 points. The first 4 are just background.
Maybe just call it "series of tubes"? Stevens is pretty layman, so I wouldn't be surprised most people can understand better with description like that.
I think criticisms of Stevens' "series of tubes" comment are a tad overblown. After all, the engineers DO use "pipes" as a term of art for the connections between routers. I suspect Stevens heard some of this talk and was trying to repeat it, but warped "pipe" into "tube" - a reasonable layman mistake.
"Informaiton superhighway" is actually not all that bad (with packets as little mail trucks carrying postcards, core routers as interchanges, and edge routers as on ramps).
Personally I like "container shipping", though:
- Data is shipped from any computer (big company) to any other.
- Data is packed into little shipping containers, called "packets", and mounted on little trucks (or whatever) for shipping.
- You write the destination and return address on each packet, so the shipper knows where to send it and who to notify if something goes awry, and the recipient knows who it's from. For some kinds of packets you also add a sending and receiving department. You may also label it with what sort of thing it contains and how to handle it: (Perishable: get it there fast or throw it out. Important: Take extra care to get it there even if it goes slower. Junkmail: Dump it before you'd dump something important.) And you label it with a maximum number of sorting centers to go through (so it won't keep getting shipped around forever if the shippers get confused about routes).
- The capacity of a packet is pretty small, so if you have a big chunk of data (like a novel, the encyclopedia brittanica, or a continuous data feed like frames of film or a magazine subscription) you have to break it up into multiple packets to ship it. You number the pieces so your big chunk, or continuous stream, can be reassembled at the other end. (Actually your shipping department does this for you: See TCP.)
- Every port on every host is a loading dock with a distinct address. (The loading docks on shipping centers have distinct addresses, too.)
- The packets are each loaded onto a distinct delivery van or container-shipping flatbed truck.
- A link between a host and a router, or between two routers, is a way to ship packets. It might be a road, or a scheduled or intermittent stream of ships, cargo planes, or trains. Roads come in various sizes, from country dirt roads (dialup modem links), through paved private roads (DSL links, T1s) to giant, multilane, interstate/autobahn arteries (fiber optic lines). It might be a conveyor belt, where you get regularly-scheduled slots, or one where you can use the next empty slot.
- IP core networks are freeways. TDM networks (digitized telephone backbones) are conveyor belts. Satellite links are regularly (or irregularly) scheduled cargo spacecraft. And so on.
- The shipping company might stuff the packet in a bag and put its own outer label on it, with the address of the next sorting center. Depends on the particular carrier's procedures.
- Core routers are sorting centers.
- Edge routers are the first/last shipping center - where the pickup/delivery vans to the customers bring the packages.
- Peering points are where two shipping companies hand off containers to each other.
- Subscriber management boxes are shipping centers where extra work is done: Inspecting the package and dumping bombs, dope, and junkmail. Collecting postage or tolls. Checking that the customer is paying his bills and not shipping too many packages at a time, etc. Sometimes this is done at the "edge" shipping center. Sometimes the company only has one or a few, and routes all the packages through one.
- Packets might be transshipped between different kinds of transport: Delivery bike (dialup), truck (IP network), bullet train (fibe
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Parent (AC) is totally right. If you can get someone to understand the basics of the internet, and they want to understand how the data is sent... It's just like a postal system. Except instead of hundreds of postcards a minute... it's billions.
"They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
It displays an amazing ignorance of the scale and nature of the Internet. He is almost certainly not waiting to receive a 10 megabyte email, so the other traffic on the Internet is essentially meaningless. My ping times to anywhere in the world are never above 1 second (except to dialup users), which means that email will not be delayed much longer than the time it takes to transmit it with available bandwidth. There is no "filled" tube for a message to get in line behind, only a great number of packets of roughly the same size with equal priority. The real reason his email took longer to arrive than expected was probably because of busy spam/virus/censorship/echelon filters and spam-clogged email servers.
In fact, he Internet *is* something to just dump things on. It is designed to work that way because it's a packet switched network. It's not like a highway where mac trucks block traffic; the mac trucks and cars get cut up into equal size packets and the packets all go the same speed. The mac trucks still take longer to get where they're going, but none of the cars ever have to wait behind them. At worst, the roads just get too crowded and bandwidth has to be increased.
Computer networks are ubiquitous enough that most people with any attachment to business know what a network is. Just describe the Internet as a network of networks. That's what it is, after all.
They don't have to understand how it actually works. But they understand the concept of networking through social networking. It's a concept that's innate to human nature. Computer networking really isn't any different, and isn't a hard topic for people to grasp in general terms.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I like to use Webopedia for succinct definitions like this.
"A global network connecting millions of computers. More than 100 countries are linked into exchanges of data, news and opinions..."
http://webopedia.com/TERM/I/Internet.html
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
That's how I tried to explained the internet to my mother. Each Computer has a telephone number (= IP number), which can be used by computers to call one or more other computers (single call, conference call). WWW is just a way how they talk to one another, when they are connected. Surely not more correct than the series of tubes, but it was good enough for her.
The internet is like a sausage - except different...