LibraryTechtonics

My friend Colin is an applications developer who has a way with tech *and* words (See also: Librarians as business travellers in the computer culture).

If you’ve ever been really confused about the true meaning of packets, protocols, and transfer of data on the internet, Colin wrote a really good post making a *vast* improvement on an old analogy. A snippet:

Imagine that you work in a large and somewhat old-fashioned office building. If you want to send a message to your buddy Joe over at XYZ Corp, this is how it goes. You write out your letter on a piece of paper and put a sticky note on it saying, “Please send to Joe Smith at XYZ Corp,” and hand it to your secretary. She (I said this was an old-fashioned place) puts the letter in an envelope and puts Joe Smith’s name on it. Then she looks up the address for XYZ Corp and writes that on the envelope, along with your return address. Then she hands it off to the guys in the mail room.

What they do is interesting. They look at the address for XYZ Corp and say, “Hmm… that’s out of town. It needs to go to Central.” So they put your envelope inside another envelope and write “Central Post Office” on it.

When it gets to the central post office, they open the outer envelope and read the address on your letter. They say, “Oh, this is going to Chicago,” or wherever. So they put your envelope inside another envelope and write “Central Post Office, Chicago” on it.

Then it gets to the Central Post Office in Chicago. They open up the envelope addressed to them and see the address for XYZ Corp. So they put it in another envelope that just has the 9-digit zip code for the XYZ Corp building on it.

It shows up at XYZ Corp, and the guys in their mail room open up that envelope and see that it’s addressed to Joe Smith. Somebody runs it upstairs to Joe’s secretary, and she opens the envelope and hands Joe your letter. When Joe sends a reply back, it works the same way.

This is how the Internet works.

Go read the rest. No, really, you should. It’s entertaining professional development.
Some tech terms and alphabet soup to learn from the post include:
- packet
- protocol
- IP
- TCP
- SMTP
- HTTP
(Defintions care of Wikipedia, because they’re really good for these sorts of things.)

Tags: technology