How does the internet work?

Question

Where does it come from? Could it ever shut down?

In: Technology

Answer 1

The Internet is a fabric that sends messages, called packets, from server computers to user computers. It does not come form a “place”, so it can’t be shut down by going to that place with a pair of wire cutters. There are central resources, like the DNS that translates “www.reddit.com” to 199.232.37.140 . However, the concept of these central resources still supports the idea of distributed storage and sharing. The people that engineered it were trying to enable US government communications after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union (back in those days).