Alright, I’m working on an essay for my English course. Even though English was always my best course in school (well, the writing part, not the reading classic literature in Old English), sometimes (as you’ve probably noticed), I have a tendency to ramble and get sidetracked. It’s also tough, given the subject matter I’ve chosen, to know where to draw the line when explaining something.
So I’ll put it to you guys, my readers. I need your opinions thus far on what I’ve written. It’s an explanitory essay, basically explaining how something works or how a process is accomplished (much like a National Geographic essay about how a nuclear bomb is developed - outlining the basic concepts involved). For my topic, I chose “How the Internet Works”, since it was the only thing I could come up with that I would be remotely interested in (and hey, being interested in a subject can’t hurt my grade).
What started off as describing the nature of the Internet as a physical medium has actually turned into describing what dangers the issue of de-peering can cause to the internet population. Like I said when I posted it to our class bulletin board, “nothing spells ratings like predictions of doom and gloom”.
Keeping in mind that I’m talking to an audience of non-technical people, please let me know what you think of the start for my essay here. The minimum length is only 400 words, which I’ve probably already come pretty close to hitting, so also take into account that I’m going to have to get on with things and wrap it up fairly quickly.
Today the Internet as we know it is a continuously growing and highly redundant entity that stretches around the globe. Billions of people every day connect to this global computer network to do everything from swapping the latest jokes via email to swapping the hottest stocks via eTrade. It has been designed from the ground up to be one of the most redundant and reliable networks ever conceived, and yet it has one fatal weakness that could mean the end of its glorious reign. What is it that could bring one of the most heavily relied upon mediums of conversation to a halt in minutes?
The Internet is a vast global computer network comprised of millions of individual computers. From individual personal desktops, laptops, and even media centers to servers, data centers, and the Department of Defense, all these computers have one thing in common: their network.
At its most basic level, the Internet is nothing more than an average computer network, much like that providing connectivity to your desktop at work or your lab computer at Tech. A single wire runs from your machine to a switch - a single box bringing many smaller connections into a single point, much as a highway interchange brings many smaller access roads and streets into a single larger freeway.
From there, out through your company data center or the ______ Information Services building on the Barton campus, and on to your Internet Service Provider, your ISP. As your data enters their building, again a single small wire among hundreds, it flows into another similar switch, just as state highways flow gracefully into even larger systems of interstate highways.
That ____ will be replaced by the name of the building as soon as I see it tomorrow morning on my way to class, and I plan to slip in some statistics (like the number of hosts on the Internet, assuming I can find some reliable source for those).
Please, I welcome your comments. Was my highways analogy too much?
You used “redundant” twice in the first paragraph you will need to change one of them.
and “individual” twice in the second - you don’t need the second one.
put a comma after centers “…centers, to servers…”
change …”centers, and the Department of Defense, all…” to “…centers and the Department of Defense; all…”
The highways analogy was alright, but you might need to change the way it’s described to something along the lines of: local street to collector street to sub arterial road to arterial road.
Just my 2c.
Yeah, I realize there’s a bunch of stuff that needs changing in the way of grammar (and probably spelling) before it’s ready to be submitted. I haven’t put it through Word or anything yet, that was just a quick type-up from my nots and the intro paragraph I had thus far.
I thought the highway analogy was a tad… I’m not sure the word to describe it. Around here, though, everything is a highway or it’s not. Whether it’s a national interstate or a state highway, or just a big road… it’s a “highway”. Without getting too specific or cheesy, I was trying to simplify things and keep with the common vernacular for our area. I doubt anyone in the class would be able to distinguish between a collector or arterial road (without ever-wise Google, of course). I’ll kep working on that. Who knows, I may be able to come up with a better analogy all together (blood vessels, capilaries, etc. anyone?).
Aside from that, you like the direction I’m heading? I’m trying to build up the whole idea of redundancy and fault-tollerance, then point out that “oh yeah, you can ruin it all by unplugging this cable here, seperating both peers and effectively splitting the internet in half”. Put all those routing protocols and terminology into simple terms and we end up with highways… ahh, I love dumbing stuff down.
The direction is interesting, I don’t think I have seen it done like that before. Which is good. Too many people just copy what has been done before without interpreting it themselves.
I’ll be interested to see how you are going to fit it all into 400 words.