The internet is a network of computers which spans the entire world.
The internet is a decentralized network – in other words, every computer connected to it is treated the same.
Computers which have content that people want to access are often called
‘servers’ because they serve up that content to other computers.
In practice, the internet is made up of many computers all
around the world connected together by dedicated infrastructure. It is
impossible to know exactly how many computers there are on the internet,
but it is estimated there were more than 100,000,000 servers online by
2013. Imagine huge rooms filled with computers, joined by cables that
cover every country and go under every ocean – that is what the internet
is like physically! It doesn’t matter to us where the computers are or
how we are connected to them – once you’re connected to the internet you
can talk to any of the other computers.
The internet isn’t owned or controlled by any one organization. Many
large organizations have a huge amount of servers they make available on
the internet – for example it is estimated that Facebook alone had over
200,000 of their own servers in 2013, and Google have over ten times
that number.
No comments:
Post a Comment