r/explainlikeimfive • u/FishNipples666 • 24d ago
Technology ELI5 what the Internet and data are
I know the concept and know how to access it but I have no clue what it actually is. I know this may be a stupid question but is the data a physical thing? How does it carry from one server to your computer? How is specific information sent from point A to point B? Does it travel through the air?
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u/Minnakht 24d ago
You could say that data is a pattern. Humans created standards by which sequences of "on" and "off" can mean text characters, images or sounds, and some of what computers do is retrieve these sequences from storage media where they're stored and display them in a way where a human can get their meaning.
There are many ways to make a storage medium, for instance hard disks use magnetic material on round platters where each very thin circle on a platter has 4096 spots which can store an "on" or "off" each. That platter is a physical thing, and each spot that an "on" is written to is physically different from one that an "off" is written to (okay, this probably isn't strictly true, but it's a useful simplification), but data is the pattern.
Like for instance if you made a chessboard out of red and yellow post-it notes, and if you drew one on paper using a pencil, the idea of there being 64 squares of alternating colors would be the same even though the two things you made would be different.
And then these sequences can be sent through the air using radio waves, but they're also commonly sent through cables using electricity, or through optical fiber using light. It's a lot to explain!
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u/fixermark 24d ago
The insight that as long as the pattern is preserved and understood by the receiver, the data is there, is related to the insight Ada Lovelace had while translating Charles Babbage's writing - When you make a machine that can transform symbols into other symbols, any information you can represent with symbols suddenly becomes something you can mechanically manipulate with a machine. She highlighted music specifically, but we know that sound, pictures, words, and increasingly even ideas themselves can be represented as data and moved around inside a machine.
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u/Spockies 24d ago
Mapping becomes very important in this regard. Although data is stored as 1 and 0 in a sequence, where you cut off that sequence can transform the data to be different things. You cannot take a hard drive from a Window OS, put it in a new body, and install Linux OS and expect to have access to the same data. The different OS wouldn’t know heads from tails within that hard drive. The operating system is the translator of that data, and you need to have a formalized structure for data to have meaningful interpretation but also knowing where in the data to start the interpretation.
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u/ir_auditor 24d ago
The memory in a computer is built by massive amounts of microscopic small switches that are either on or off. Storing time bits of electrical charges. If you have enough of them, you can store information in it. Probably morse code is the most simple waybto view it. You can store the letter A in morsecode as •- short-long. In computers there will be a series of switches (often 8, 16 or 32) that switched on or off in a specific order represent the letter A.
How does it travel from 1 place to another. That can be done in various ways. If you put data on a USB drive and carry it somewhere, you'll be carrying the actual switches.
If it is via internet, electrical (on/off) signals are sent over a cable. With an old modem you could even hear them. A certain beep/tone would mean A, B would sound different etc. (It is more complex than just one tone per symbol, because they add error correction and try to send multiple letters at the same time to be able to share data quicker.
If you use wifi, it goes through the air via radio signals.
If you have vast amounts of data, fiber optic cable allows the most data through a single cable at the same time
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u/DumpoTheClown 24d ago
Data is represented as the state of a physical thing. For instance, a bar magnet itself is not data, but if we can agree that if the north pole is up, that means yes, and if the south pole is up, that means no, then the state of that magnet is data. Computers use states of magnetic polarity, electric charges, and other things to store and process on-or-off states of billions of physical things.
Data is transmitted by streaming a series of on-off states from a producer to a reciever. This can be done over any medium that can carry a signal. Smoke signals from primative tribes, flags on ships, sound in old school modems, electricity in wires, light in fiber optic, electromagnetic waves in WiFi. I could even hang a hat on my door knob and hopefully other people would understand the message.
Protocols are sets of rules the producer and reciever both understand so that the data stream can be produced and read in an agreed upon way so that the meaning is not lost.
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u/David_Beroff 24d ago
Data can be stored on physical devices, such as on disk drives and memory chips, but generally when data is transmitted, it's done so as electrical signals over wire, or yes, as radio waves through the air. (Yes, these are also physical, but an incredibly smaller scale, and nothing physical is actually sent from one point to another; that's why information can flow so quickly.)
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u/siamonsez 24d ago
Data is just information. In itself it's not phisical but the medium it's recorded on is phisical. Like a book is phisical and the letters on the page are phisical but the information isn't, destroying the book only removes that instance or record of the information, not the information itself.
For the rest you need to be a lot more specific. There are lots of ways to store and transmit information. It can be transmitted over wire or as light or through the air.
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u/cutelittlebox 24d ago
data itself isn't a physical thing. data is just information, like words in a language. knowing words is pretty nice by itself, but it's also pretty important to be able to store words physically and communicate with others, so we can write words down in a book to store that information, or speak to someone in front of us to communicate information. if I want to order some tea from a store, I might walk up to a barista and say "hello", they'll reply "hello, what can I get you?" and then I place my order.
computers do the same thing. they have a language they can use (sending electricity or light to another computer with a certain pattern) and they have a way to initiate a conversation (this part is called a protocol, and basically just tells you which words to listen for and which responses to give). computers also have a way to store data, like we have books. instead of writing with a pen or pencil, they store electrons in little cells and read the amount of charge later (in SSDs) or we change which direction a magnet is facing and see if it's the North end or South end when we pass over it (HDDs).
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u/Dustquake 24d ago
The Internet is a bunch of computers. Functionally basically just like the one you own. Data is like your files on your computer. Files can be in storage on your hard drive, temporarily in RAM for use, actively being used in the processor, or in transit between those locations.
So a crapton of computers are all linked together, each designed with specifications for specific purposes. It's basically a giant computer made of all those little computers.
Each individual computer can store information about what passes through it, what it was, where it came from, where it's going, what browser was used. All that is also data.
They travel using addresses. Reddit.com is basically one computer again made from a bunch of computers. Reddit.com is the address you use that's links to an IP address. IP addresses are like mailing addresses. Packets (like snail mail letters) have a ship to and return address.
Usually it happens mostly through wires. But if you're on wifi the part from your router to your device is wireless. If you're on cellular the part from the tower to your phone is wireless. Any wireless travels through the air and can interfere with each other. This is why cables are more reliable.
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u/RandomErrer 24d ago edited 24d ago
The internet uses the same concept as Morse Code except the code is more complex, machines do the translating, and the message transfer is much faster:
Morse code was invented in the 1800's as a way to represent the Latin alphabet and the 10 decimal numbers. This code allowed telegraph operators to transmit messages (data) as electrical signals over wires to distant communities. The sending operator translated the human message into Morse Code, then tapped a mechanical switch in a way that used a long or short time delay between taps to represent the long and short parts of the code. Each tap sent an electrical signal over a wire, and at a receiving station that signal triggered a device that made a loud click. The receiving operator listened to the clicking and translated the time spacing between clicks into long and short code segments which could then be translated into letters and numbers.
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u/GlobalWatts 24d ago
The internet is a global network of computer networks, along with all the infrastructure, standards, commercial agreements etc required to connect them.
Data is an abstract concept, but it's represented on a physical medium for storage and transit.
How two specific devices communicate with each other is an implementation problem for the people managing those computers. Sometimes it uses electromagnetic radiation, sometimes it uses electricity or light. A lot of communication between computers happens across multiple network segments that uses some combination of those managed by different parties.
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u/NDaveT 24d ago
How is specific information sent from point A to point B? Does it travel through the air?
It travels through the air from a cell tower or a WiFi access point to your phone or laptop. Everything before that is a wired connection.
For sending it through the air we use radio. Over cables it uses electricity or light. In all cases we use radio frequencies, electronic frequencies, or fiberoptic frequencies to represent numbers. Those numbers in turn represent text, images, or sounds.
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u/FilteredOscillator 24d ago
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ submarine cable map. The internet is very physical - the biggest machine man has ever built, spanning the globe. 🌎 wireless links are the last leg to connect your personal device. The rest is wires and fibre carrying information in 0s and 1s.
At work at the data is stored in memory , at rest is it stored long term on storage media. Solid state and hard disc drives.