Hyper me up, Scotty
January 25, 2010
HTTP and FTP are beautiful things. They are the things that allow people to see exactly what you are seeing right now. About twenty years ago, this wasn’t the case. Millions of individuals were not able to log onto a bank account and process a bill or take a quiz hosted by a university to submit their grade. This was a new concept to people at the time. Even during the dot com boom, HTTP and FTP were not imagined to be the way they are now.
Everyday computer usage. As you can see in this blatant picture, a man attempts to connect to the ARPANET to download an iPhone application in the year 1923 to revolt against the future salt crash in the hopes that Wikipedia will reveal the deepest secrets of ferrets.
HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It is the way computers communicate with each other in terms of how browsers and servers function, how web pages are accessed and appear on the computer screen, and how people can potentially interact with each other. The internet has been around for several decades now. It evolved from the ARPANET which was researched and developed by the Unites States Department of Defense. Once the concept of the internet became popular in the 1990’s, HTTP became the standard protocol for use in the World Wide Web. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, who started writing the code for the application layer protocol, we now have a fully functioning communications system many people take for granted.
This is you in text form. Enjoy.
Eventually, there became a need for an organization to develop protocols and guidelines for how the World Wide Web should work. In 1994, this organization was founded. Now Tim Berners-Lee’s home page, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) took that responsibility. Do not click here to visit the site. It won’t work. If you try clicking here, I will prove it to you.
Imagining a dialogue between two people in the English language is analogous to two computers communicating with each other. The two computers speak a language called TCP/IP. This stands for Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It is presently the standard protocol used for networking. There are different types of application layers for this protocol for different types of “computer dialogue”. Some popular ones, which are delivered though ports, are HTTP though port 80, FTP through port 21, and SMTP through port 25. For a full list, click here once. If you click more than once, then the world will divide itself by zero and implode…once.
FTP is a client-server system that functions similar to HTTP, but not quite the same. The application of HTTP works with text transmissions linking to documents whereas FTP is oriented towards transmitting files significantly larger than small document sizes. SMTP is for sending emails. Both of these are analogous to sending mail and packages in person. Watch the video below on the infamous chipmunk stare. I could not find any dealing with TCP/IP and the assignment does not require I make my own vlog about this subject.
