alt="Snapshot of Admiral Grace Hopper’s log of the first actual case of a bug being found."/>
Source: US Navy
FIGURE 1-4: Admiral Grace Hopper’s log of the first actual case of a bug being found.
The people who invented all this terminology think of the Internet as being some great blob in the sky — it’s up, as in “up in the sky.” So, if you send something from your computer to the Internet, you’re uploading. If you take something off the Internet and put it on your computer, you’re downloading.
The cloud is just a marketing term for the Internet. Saying that you put your data “in the cloud” sounds so much cooler than saying you copied it to storage on the Internet. Programs can run in the cloud — that is, they run on the Internet. Just about everything that has anything to do with computers can be done in the cloud. Just watch your pocketbook.
When you put computers together, you network them, and if your network doesn’t use wires, it's called a Wi-Fi network. At the heart of a network sits a box, commonly called a router or an access point, that computers can plug into. If the router has “rabbit ears” on top, for wireless connections, it’s usually called a Wi-Fi router. Keep in mind that some Wi-Fi routers may not have antennae outside and keep them hidden inside their box. Yes, fine lines of distinction exist among all these terms. No, you don’t need to worry about them.
There are two basic ways to hook up to the Internet: wired and wireless. Wired is easy: You plug your computer into a router or some other box that connects to the Internet. Wireless falls into two categories: Wi-Fi connections, which you find in many homes, coffee shops, airports, and all kinds of public places, and cellular (mobile phone–style) wireless connections.
Cellular Wireless Internet connections are identified with one of the G levels: 2G, 3G, 4G, or maybe even 5G. Each G level is faster than its predecessor.
This part gets a little tricky. If your smartphone can connect to a 3G or 4G network, it may be possible to set it up to behave like a Wi-Fi router: Your laptop talks to the smartphone, and the smartphone talks to the Internet over its 3G or 4G (or 5G) connection. That process is called tethering — your laptop is tethered to your smartphone. Not all smartphones can tether, and not all manufacturers allow it.
Special boxes called mobile hotspot units work much the same way: The mobile hotspot connects to the 3G or 4G (or 5G) connection, and your laptop gets tethered to the mobile hotspot box. Most smartphones these days can be configured as mobile hotspots.
If you plug your Internet connection into the wall, you have broadband, which may run via fiber (a cable that uses light waves), DSL or ADSL (which uses regular old phone lines), cable (as in cable TV), or satellite. The fiber, DSL, cable, or satellite box is called a modem, although it’s really a router. Although fiber-optic lines are inherently much faster than DSL or cable, individual results can be all over the lot. Ask your neighbors what they’re using and then pick the best. If you don’t like your current service, vote with your wallet.
If a bad guy (and they’re almost always guys) manages to take over your computer without your knowledge, turning it into a zombie that spews spam by remote control, you’re in a botnet. (And yes, the term spam comes from the immortal Monty Python routine that’s set in a cafe serving Hormel’s SPAM luncheon meat, the chorus bellowing “lovely Spam, wonderful Spam.”) Check out Book 9 for details about preventing scumware and the like from messing with you.
The most successful botnets employ rootkits — programs that run underneath Windows, evading detection because regular programs can’t see them. The number of Windows 10 computers running rootkits is probably two or three or four orders of magnitudes less than the number of zombified Windows XP computers. However, as long as Windows XP computers are out there, botnets will continue to be a major threat to everyone.
What, Exactly, Is the Web?
Years from now, the operating system you use will be largely irrelevant, as will be the speed of your computer, the amount of memory you have, and the number of terabytes of storage that hum in the background. Microsoft will keep milking its cash cow, but the industry will move on. Individuals and businesses will stop shelling out big bucks for Windows and the iron to run it. Instead, the major push will be online. Rather than spend money on PCs that become obsolete the week after you purchase them, folks will spend money on big data pipes: It’ll be less about me and more about us. Why? Because so much more is “out there” than “in here.” Count on it.
But what is the Internet? This section answers this burning question (if you’ve asked it). If you don’t necessarily wonder about the Internet’s place in space and time just yet, you will … you will.
This isn’t one of them.
The Internet started in the mid-1960s as an academic exercise — primarily with the RAND Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the National Physical Laboratory in England — and rapidly evolved into a military project, under the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), designed to connect research groups working on ARPA projects.
By the end of the 1960s, ARPA had four computers hooked together — at UCLA, SRI (Stanford), UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah — using systems developed by BBN Technologies (then named Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.). By 1971, it had eighteen. I started using ARPANET in 1975. According to the website www.internetworldstats.com, at the beginning of 2020, the Internet had more than 4.5 billion users worldwide — well over half of the global population.
