ABSTRACT

It’s a Wednesday evening, and you’ve just sat down at your computer. In a matter of minutes, you’re scanning an e-commerce site for your aunt’s birthday present, you’re composing an e-mail message to your professor via your school e-mail account, you’re listening to your brother’s radio show broadcast live from a college hundreds of miles away, you’ve received regular updates on the temperature and forecast for your city, and you’re using your computer for an online chat with a friend from home. Without the Internet, none of these actions would be possible. •ink about how much you depend on communicating via your computer-it may be much more than you realize. When was the last time you actually mailed a letter in paper form? But what exactly happens to make e-mail and work with the Internet possible? Where does the information reside, and how do computers know what to display? To begin, let us recall what we already know about hardware and network organization.