Jenny Townes

Week 4 Reading Notes

1. How the material helped: The portion dealing with the internet in general helped more than anything else. I never knew exactly how a web browser worked--how did one write a webpage in html but view it in text and images? I also didn't know how search engines worked. I was curious as well about the construction of an IP address. In an earlier class you mentioned that the first few numbers of UNCs IP meant ‘University of North Carolina’. I didn’t understand at the time why that was so or even how that could be so. Now I do, so that is an important way this material helped me.
The reading sections on creating web pages I had read before, but after reading this week’s assignments it now makes more sense.
Despite the trouble I had with the TCP/IP readings I did understand the concept of TCP/IP layering, and that helped a little to explain the rest of the readings.

2. What I didn't understand: The first website dealing with TCP/IP was good. I understood most of it. The “Network of lowest bidders” section, however, was less than easy to understand: lots of acronyms not explained. The section on regional carriers and how routers work was unclear as well, though I think I grasped the general idea.
The TCP/IP Basics site was extremely hard to understand. Everything I thought I had understood from the previous reading didn’t make sense in the context of this reading. A sentence like “WinInet API actually encapsulates this layer and talks to TCP layer under the hood” is difficult to understand if you don’t know what WinInet API is or what ‘under the hood’ means. There were many acronyms and terms on this site that were not explained.

3. Additional questions