Tools for Information Literacy

Preparations for Networks and Protocols session

on Local Area Networks

read these sections of How Ethernet Works by Nick Pidgeon in How Stuff Works (they are short, so you can read more if you wish)

1. Introduction to How Ethernet Works
2. Why Network?
3. Local Area vs. Wide Area
4. The Ethernet
5. Ethernet Basics
6. Ethernet Terminology
7. Ethernet Medium

Watch a short discussion of the relationships we will discuss today.

on The Internet, a network of networks

First watch this TED talk about the physical part of the Internet

A map of underwater cables may make it more understandable.

Then look at the first two articles in this series in The Economist, 29 January 2024, entitled Where the internet lives

1. The foundations of the cloud: Users of the internet need not think about its physical underpinnings
2. Towers of glass and steel: Advances in physical storage and retrieval made the cloud possible
3. There are seven more installments in this series that you may wish to read as well.

Other items relevant to today's class

1. 50 years of the Internet: half a century of light and shadow
2. Lawrence Roberts, Who Helped Design Internet's Precursor, Dies at 81
3. Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet
4. What is the internet? 13 key questions answered
5. WWW vs. the Internet: What's the Difference?
6. Internet topology: What does the Internet look like?
7. It was a really bad month for the internet
8. The infrastructure mess causing countless internet outages
9. How A Small ISP in Pennsylvania Tanked a Big Chunk of the Web on Monday
10. Mary Meeker's most important trends on the internet
11. Russia wants to cut itself off from the global internet. Here's what that really means.
12. Russia Takes a Big Step Toward Internet Isolation
13. The Top 10 Internet Browsers for 2019
14. Google takes its first steps toward killing the URL
15. Why There Are Only 13 DNS Root Name Servers
16. Introduction to How Internet Infrastructure Works
17. A Hierarchy of Networks
18. A Network Example
19. Bridging The Divide
20. Backbones
21. Internet Protocol: IP Addresses
22. Internet Protocol: Domain Name System
23. Uniform Resource Locators
24. A DNS Example
25. Clients and Servers
26. Ports