Chapter 18. How the Internet Brings Us the World

Image

It doesn’t make a lot of difference if the Internet represents the accumulated knowledge humans have acquired since they came down from the trees. No matter that virtually any book, movie, or song can be found, somewhere, on the Net. And it doesn’t mean a thing that every one of your friends, from the first person you met in kindergarten on up, can be reached through the Internet.

Everything about your Internet experience derives from how you get all that data down that last mile to your computer. And not all last miles are the same. The technologies of DSL and cable, the two most common Internet ...

Get How Computers Work: The Evolution of Technology, Tenth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.