As I child I once thought that you could download (let’s say) a 100GB file and store it offline to then provide another device with internet, spending those 100GB offline, why this can’t be done?
In: Technology
The best you can really do is downloading Wikipedia, which still wouldn’t be great because you would miss out on updates.
It can. You can download it, copy it to a storage medium like a flash drive or external HDD/SSD, plug the storage into the other computer, and *viola*. You’ve made a copy without the internet. If you can connect the two computers directly with a wire, like an ethernet cord, you can even do it without any extra storage.
If you’re asking why you can’t send it *over the internet* from one computer to another without using the internet…well, I’d hope that one answers itself 🙂
> why this can’t be done?
Think about it this way, can you store up a bottle of live telephone conversations with your grandmother? Of course not; you can record conversations but you can’t fill up a tape with conversations which haven’t happened yet!
The internet is a way of communicating with other computers across the world. In the same way you can’t have an old recording that acts like a live telephone call with your grandmother today, you can’t have a hard drive full of “internet” that works like the internet does.
Now if you know you want some files you can access on the internet now to be available later then you can certainly download and store them, but you can’t store up future information.
The modern day internet is a distributed system of communication across millions of computers all around the world. There’s no centralized location to download the entire thing from and no way you could feasibly store all the data from all web servers in one location. And even if you could, anything which requires authentication simply doesn’t allow privileges for remote clients to download. So you could use anything you need to log on for or shopping carts for example.
Internet is not the data but more the road to access said data. Your internet provider provides the pipeline and charges for access.
The issue is that you’d only be providing that other device with the exact same 100 GB file you downloaded earlier. So if you downloaded 100 GB of Reddit pages, the person browsing later would only see the pages from the moment you downloaded them, no posts or replies that were newer. And if they wanted to check their e-mail or twitter, they wouldn’t be able to do that since those weren’t things you downloaded earlier.
As politely as possible, I will answer your question with a similar question and then explain. If you buy a country music CD with 12 songs, and put it into your CD player, why can’t it play 12 K-pop songs?
Data is stored in ones and zeros which could technically be physically represented as a series of switches, the position of a long series of these switches is interpreted by the base level code of your PC, the crust of your pizza if you will, and translated into something you understand, or instructions for itself. When you download your example 100GB file, you are downloading the exact sequence of ones and zeros that comprise that specific data, meaning if you are downloading a 100 GB game for instance, you’re downloading what could be physically represented as a huge string of switches in a very specific order which your computer then interprets as the game. When you use data online in real time to browse web pages your computer is constantly downloading and then discarding brand new sequences of ones and zeros to translate, so unless you want to look at exactly what the old sequence of ones and zeros meant at the time it was saved it doesn’t help you in the future. Hopefully this helps as much as possible!
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