In the last two weeks we’ve been talking about the internet: first how we use it ourselves, or not in some cases, and how the global village is divided in two. In case you didn’t get the handout, the original article can be found here. What I gave out was from World & Press, so it’s slightly different, and also provides you with vocabulary.
Most people found the text difficult, not perhaps because of the language, but because it’s about something that we basically don’t really understand. So here’s a bit of help:
Bandwidth:
To understand bandwidth, it’s maybe helpful to think of the Internet as a series of roads and information as cars. If there’s only one car on the road, that car will travel quickly and easily. If there are many cars, however, traffic can build up and slow things down. The Internet works the same way — if only one person is downloading one file, the transfer should happen fairly quickly. If several people are trying to download the same file, though, the transfer can be much slower.
In this analogy, bandwidth is the number of lanes on the motorway. If a Web site’s bandwidth is too low, traffic will become congested. If the Web site increases its bandwidth, information will be able to travel back and forth without much trouble.
Server:
In general, all the machines on the internet are either clients or servers. You are using the web, but not offering any services to others from your computer, so you are a client. The computers that offer websites, and carry the software that allows computers to communicate with each other are servers. I pinched this simple diagram from How Stuff Works.
You ask for the website by typing the name into the correct place on your browser programme. Let’s say, for example, http://englishcoach.wordpress.com/. The first part, the http is the protocol, which I suppose could be compared to an agreement between the computers as to which form of communication they are using. The next part is the name of the server. This first has to go to a name server, which is a bit like an address book. It converts the letters that make sense to humans into numbers that make sense to computers. It will look something like 75.101.157.53:80, for example. The browser programme on your computer sends a request to the wordpress server, and it sends the data with all the tags so that your computer knows what to do with the data and formats it correctly on your screen: voilà!
I hope that helps a bit. I don’t understand this stuff too well myself, but then it’s quite often helpful to have a non-expert to do the explaining, as they don’t presuppose any previous knowledge. For more information about web advertising go here.
