Internet Addresses

Adjacent Figure: A schematic picture of some of the main links of the Internet in the United States. Each line represents links between some major nodes of the Internet. Only the links carrying the most network traffic are shown. If all Internet links were shown on this image, the image would be completely covered by lines many times over.


The Internet is a vast network of many different computers that are able to talk to each other in spite of the fact that they may be separated by large distances, may be very different computers built by different manufacturers, and may be running many different kinds of operating systems. This is similar to people in (say) Israel, Brazil, Japan, the United States, and Norway, each normally speaking a different language, being able to converse almost instantaneously with each other on very broad ranges of topics!

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