Now, lets understand how it works. The most synonymous term to the Internet is a computer. It is often the source and destination. Digital systems, like computers, work on a different number system from humans. For digital systems, its known as binary system while for humans its called decimal system. The decimal number system has ten symbols; 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. A binary number system, one the other hand, has simply two symbols; 0 and 1, called bits. Simple ,right? These two symbols are used to represent anything, I mean anything – numbers, letters, words, images, videos, symbols, voice and so on.
To understand how this happens, we start with an illustration. Using two binary bits, we can represent decimal numbers 0, 1, 2 and 3 as follows; 00 01 10 11. The right most bit is called the Least Significant Bit (LSB) while the left most bit is called Most Significant Bit (MSB). From the LSB to MSB each step corresponds to an increase of the power of 2 by one. Similarly, in decimal number system, each step means an increase of the the power of 10 by one - say 10 and 100 means and increase from 101 to 102 . You follow?
Take an example. John from Texas, USA wants to send a number 2 to Otieno in Kisumu. When he presses 2 on the keyboard, the computer encodes it into two binary bits - 10 (or other code depending on the standard in use). The two bits are processed, encapsulated with the Internet Protocol (IP) address of John's Internet Provider Mail Server, say Verizon (a Mail Server is a high capacity computer dedicated to storage and processing of e-mails). The Mail server detects the destination e-mail address and sends the message to a Mail Server, say Wananchi On-line, in Kenya via satellite or fiber optic cable (undersea cable). The Mail Server knows Otieno's e-mail address and put it in his Inbox. When Otieno opens his Inbox, the computer decodes the binary bits into 2 for display on the monitor.
In practice the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) code is used to represent any sort of information for transmission. The ASCII character table contains various translations from binary to character or decimal. For example, a decimal number 10 is converted into 00001010 and a character C is converted into 0101001. Its a bit complicated to represent images, voice and video - sampling and quantization techniques are used to do this.
Despite the type of information being sent, the basics in transmission are the same. There are differences where information requires encryption, compression and error correction. For instance; if a message is secret password then its encrypted for anyone else not to see it ,if its a video then its compressed to reduce on bandwidth requirements. If its a synchronization message, error detection flags are incorporated ,if an error is detected then error correction is carried out or retransmission of the message requested.
