CREEPINGNET'S WORLD
NETWORKING AND INTERNET STUFF
More than you ever wanted to know about your internet connection and/or LAN/WAN
The original computer network was called "Sneakernet" and it was when you took Punch Cards, a Floppy Disk, or a CD-R and carried it via your "Sneakers" to the next desk for someone else to work on. Unfortunatley, this method was very prone to errors including people stapling floppy diskettes together, stapling punch cards, spiling coffee on the media, and most often, handing the wrong media over.

But I jest. Computer networking has existed since the 50's or 60's, when big mainframes at governments, colleges, and scientific outfits (including medical), were used to store data and carry out calculations. Then the 70's came, the microprocessors were invented, and then came the idea, by business and government, to network smaller systems together. The internet was born out of a late 1960's/early 1970's project called the ARPAnet, sometimes incorrectly called "DARPAnet". DARPA Stood for "Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency", so I can see how people got this wrong. The Arpanet was a switched packet based network going all over the globe used by researchers to share ideas, information, and whatnot - just like the internet was originally intended to do. This would evolve eventually, through political funding (Al Gore did not invent it, he PAID to have it's infrastructure expanded in the early 1990's). All the internet is, is a platform upon which other applications sit and communicate, whether that's e-mail (invented in 1983), HTML Web Pages (like this one, Tim Berner's Lee, 1989), OnLine Services (Quantumlink, AOL, Compuserve, etc.), or Social Media Apps (instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.), or streaming applications (Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, etc.).

The modern day computer sits on a LAN - Local Area Network - within your house, consisting of your cell phone(s), laptop(s), and possibly a desktop or two, plus your Smart TV's, Smart Watches, Game Systems, and other IoT type devices. All of these reach out from that network via a "Gateway/Modem" to the ISP, which will then send you to the internet, which is a WAN - Wide Area Network - that connects devices all over the world to each other. So you should now see how important that this is.