Ask YC: How would you describe the Internet to someone who has ZERO computer knowledge?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=161609

by lbrdn • 18 years ago

12 30 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

A similar question was asked in a recent Viget post and I thought it would be interesting to discuss.

dkokelley4• 18 years ago

Please elaborate on "zero computer knowledge." Is this someone from the past who doesn't even know about electricity, or just a typical person today who knows computers, but has no knowledge of the "magic" under the hood?

I'll assume the second.

Explain that the internet is just a collection of computers that are connected to each other. Some computers are always on and hold websites (servers) so that other computers (say, typical PCs) can connect to them to see the websites.

Now there are some computers that have the job of acting as the phone book so that the other computers know where to find the servers.

I like this exercise. It forces yourself to explain a system in the most simple terms possible.

lbrdn3• 18 years ago

The definition shouldn't assume the reader has any technical knowledge (think tribal medicine man, or most people's grandmother)

noonespecial2• 18 years ago

Hhmmff. Wishful thinking. My grandmother knows nothing about tribal medicine...

dkokelley4• 18 years ago

Thanks, but the difference between tribal medicine man and typical grandmother still leaves room for confusion. A typical grandmother knows that computers exist, but a tribal medicine man might spear me for stealing his soul with this mysterious "light box."

The reason I ask is because I wanted to know if I was supposed to explain the computer to this person or just how it interacts with the internet.

Maybe the question could be "explain the internet to someone from 30 years ago. (Computers present, but no complete internet to speak of)"

LPTS• 18 years ago

I'd say "Mr. Senator, congratulations on getting seated as chairman of the science, technology, and transportation committee. Before you start making laws, maybe I should teach you a couple things..." and then after an agonizing few minutes, I'd say "Forget all that...you know how the pipes in your toilet work..."

noonespecial2• 18 years ago

"Forget all that...you know how the pipes in your toilet work..."

The sad part is, you would likely also get a blank stare to this as well. There are people who float through life with nearly NO understanding of any of the things that make their lives possible. Some even consider this something to take pride in.

henning• 18 years ago

The Internet is a global communications network which is accessed by viewing electronic documents called "pages" which contain certain highlighted parts called "links" that when accessed will lead you to other pages. A small on-screen arrow called a "cursor" can be moved around the page you are currently viewing with a navigation device called a mouse and this is used to browse and navigate documents. People use the Internet for things like news, commerce, entertainment, pornography, copyright infringement, and watching videos of lesbians eating each other's shit out of a cup like an icecream cone.

staunch• 18 years ago

If you really mean zero computer knowledge that's pretty tough challenge. I'd probably have to try a few times until I could develop a pitch that seemed to work. The "curse of knowledge" means I don't think I could imagine what it'd take to get across the concepts to someone. I'd love to try.

bprater• 18 years ago

The Internet is like being able to sit down at your desk and being able to read any book in any library anywhere on earth, instantly.

dcurtis• 18 years ago

A lot of people in the 90's used to describe the internet this way, but I think it has sort of evolved beyond just a library of knowledge.

What about the availability of instant, practically free communication?

stevecooperorg• 18 years ago

I think you don't need to be objective -- you just need to whip up enough enthusiasm to get the person over their fear of the evil compuwebs and trying it out. After that, they'll learn themselves. I had this with my mum, who is now happy googling away, buying things from amazon, and watching youtube.

Start small, with the benefits of one or two sites. Find a site that offers a batch of benefits together -- say, google, google mail, google video, google maps, and google shopping -- and tell them that this is 'home.' In fact, you could just tell them that Google is the internet, teach them to compose a search, and be done with it. People take to the web very naturally once they try it.

mhartl• 18 years ago

The Internet is a series of tubes.

ArcticCelt• 18 years ago

It's like if everybody has a TV and a mini TV studio in their home. The number of channels are nearly illimited. Main difference is that huge part of the content is text.

rokhayakebe• 18 years ago

the internet is a ginormous trailer park. it is open to anyone without limits. some people park their trailer for no particular reason. some bring their lunch wagon to sell food. some have a movie wagon. lots of wagon do not charge the residents for their service, they just love to have a lot of people around their wagon and figure a way to make money from them later. you can live the park anytime you want. you live there for life for a mere 5.99/month... ....and so on....

DocSavage• 18 years ago

Imagine big telephones that could transmit written words, images, audio, and even video. That thing over there, yeah the one with the keyboard and screen, that's the advanced telephone we call a "computer." Instead of dialing someone with numbers, you dial with letters. And we call the big telephone network the "internet."

bubaker• 18 years ago

A computer is basically something that helps me think outside of my head, like pen and paper or a chalkboard or camera and printer. The difference is that a computer helps me write, draw, and design things, and play around (with abstractions like words, numbers, diagrams, pictures, audio, video) in often easier and unique ways.

The internet is a way for me to do these types of things on a computer with other people, observing and interacting with their abstractions and letting them do the same with mine. Often, this creates an opportunity to make $$ because maybe I or others have or can come up with information and other stuff that is valuable or desirable to someone. It also provides ways of finding out about what people in general are thinking, doing, making, and wanting.

Of course, many forms of media also function similarly, but often more slowly and with less integrated ways of communicating. Take YouTube, which combines ad-driven and searchable video with discussion and polling in relative "real-time". Without the internet, a broadcast TV network might air a program which allow viewers to call-in to discuss and rate various aspects of the show. However, many aspects are not only different, but asymmetrically so. Here are some of these aspects:

- YouTube viewers register their contributions themselves - little or no effort by the "network" and certainly not the producer/provider - even if the network had someone transcribe the discussion, it would not be available soon or cheaply - ads (which drive so much of the web and so the internet for many) are simultaneous, usually unobtrusive, targeted, and often interactive as well - the act of viewing/interacting on YouTube itself is a contribution (via logging/cookies) which in aggregate and dynamically drives further content/discussion - eventually the network company can focus on advertising and let viewers budget for content :-)

Much of the above applies in large part to organizational use of computer and internet as well, though philosophies of management, security, IP, etc can determine whether the technology is a boon or dongle. Then again, the same could be said for how I or anyone else tries to make use of the technology...

ptn• 18 years ago

The Internet is a tool that shrinks the world: it lets you communicate with whoever you want no matter where they are, read any document wherever it is and whatever the format (book, txt, html), manage every aspect of your personal life (everything from editing photos to tracking your duties with something like Google Calendar) from one single computer and even have fun with on-line games.

k0mplex• 18 years ago

I'd call it "a mechanism of world intercommunication embracing the whole planet, freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity."

This was written by Shoghi Effendi in 1936 predicting the technology of a future world commonwealth.

dkokelley4• 18 years ago

Frighteningly close, but we're not quite there yet. The "freed from national hindrances and restrictions, and functioning with marvelous swiftness and perfect regularity" part is still lacking (consider recent stories about governments monitoring and censoring the internet, and massive outages from damaged cables).

notauser• 18 years ago

Just tell them it's like a highway, for information, oh yes...

http://www.acme.com/jef/netgems/superhighway.html

"...A highway HUNDREDS of lanes wide. Most with potholes. Privately operated bridges and overpasses. No highway patrol. A couple of rent-a-cops on bicycles with broken whistles. 500 member VIGILANTE POSSES with nuclear weapons. 237 ON RAMPS at every intersection. NO SIGNS. Wanna get to Ensenada? Holler out the window at a passing truck to ask directions. AD HOC traffic laws. Some lanes would VOTE to make use by a single-occupant-vehicle a CAPITAL OFFENSE on Monday through Friday between 7:00 and 9:00. Other lanes would just SHOOT you without a trial for talking on a car phone..."

yearsinrock• 18 years ago

Virtually everything is free of cost

hooande• 18 years ago

"Porn and free music."

They may not understand it, but they'll want to check it out.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

Show, don't tell.

Or, as Louis Armstrong once said, "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know."

maxwell• 18 years ago

Telepathic magic mirrors.

jfoutz• 18 years ago

I'd start with a dictionary. A good dictionary has pictures and historical figures, almost encyclopedic. Then, add video. It's easy to imagine moving pictures in a book. Maybe add sound as well.

Next comes news. The book, somehow, can provide the daily news. It's pretty easy to imaigne daily updates to the book.

Once they see that the book can get the news, it's not to hard to extend the communication to other books. so, you could write in one book, and read the words in another.

I'd say that's about it.

schaaf• 18 years ago

Suppose there is no electricity. Suppose you're a tyrant ruling over a massive empire that spans a continent or two. For military and economic reasons, you need an official communication system, but the obvious method of having someone physically carry the messages sucks. It's slow. It's terrain-dependent. And your messengers can be captured or eaten by wolves.

Suppose you have really good telescopes, and can construct watchtowers that are tall and easy to defend. With two watchtowers 10 miles apart, a sergeant in one tower can wave a red flag or a blue flag, which the other tower can see with its telescope. With some convention like Morse code, you can relay information between the two watchtowers.

Suppose now that you build a massive network of these towers. You want to enable communication from any tower to any other tower. Clearly this is possible, but there are issues. How do the towers agree to relay messages? How do they deal with congestion? How do they recover from small errors?

So you assemble your finest engineers, give them a large military grant, and they develop some common conventions (protocols) for the tower operators to adopt. They develop Imperial Protocol (IP), a system that gives each tower a unique address and lets any tower try to send a small message packet (a few sentences) to any other tower. But IP does not ensure that the message will get through.

With IP in place, they then develop Tower Channel Protocol (TCP), which operates on top of IP and ensures reliability. Basically, the source tower and the destination tower strike up a metaconversation, notifying each other about how many words they've received so far, and resending IP packets that got lost in transmision. TCP offers a reliable point to point communication line.

With TCP in place, they develop Hannibalesque Tome Transfer Protocol (HTTP). When a general wants to send a large report, the tower operators first send some headers (like the headers on a fax) describing the document that is about to be sent and mentioning how many words long it is, then the words themselves. This is all done over a TCP connection.

When a general in province 7 wants to get the report http://province13.empire.mil/report/OPERATIONAJAX.pdf, the tower operators find the tower named "province13.empire.mil" and send it an HTTP request asking for the document named "report/OPERATIONAJAX.pdf". That tower gets this request, and sends back the report as its response.

So HTTP is built on top of TCP which is built on top of IP which is built on top of red and blue flags.

Replace Tower Channel Protocol by Transmission Control Protocol and Imperial Protocol by Internet Protocol, flags by cables, and towers by computers, and you have the internet. Replace Hannibalesque Tome Transfer Protocol by Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and you have the web.

Note: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_line Note: Are we actually seeing a practical application of the Slashdotesque "TCP/IP over *!!" meme?

prepositionjoe• 18 years ago

I explained the Web, not the Internet, to a relative with zero computer knowledge as follows:

* think about magazines and how they're made

* you have to put all the text and pictures together, then you have to print them in a huge printing plant, load them onto a thousand trucks and take them around the country

* it's slow, it's very expensive, and you might end up with millions of magazines that nobody wants, and have to throw them away

Now, imagine someone though of a better way.

Instead of you having to print the magazine on paper and take them to people, you let people's computers come to the magazine's offices and take a copy of the magazine. Then they read the magazine on the computer.

They seemed to take it well.

As far as explaining how the internet works, I've always said "you don't need to", any more than you need to explain how the phone systems works.

But how the phone system works is instructive. There are all the different countries around the world, using different languages, different equipment, different voltages for their power, but somehow, we got them all to agree on some things, so you can just pick up a phone, anywhere in the world, and dial another phone anywhere else in the world.

That's how the internet "works". Everyone has agreed on the right way for computers to talk to each other. The details are meaningless.

Ask YC: How would you describe the Internet to someone who has ZERO computer knowledge?

Related Stories