Word: packets
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...aisle, and asked where he had gotten his application. He seemed surprised by my question but politely directed me to the windowsill at the front of the room. Walking towards the stack of handouts, I felt a disproportionate number of eyes following my progress. As I lifted a packet off the top of the pile, I understood...
Think of a packet as the digital equivalent of a letter. You don't drop a letter into a mailbox like itself; you stick it into an envelope first. The packet is the packaging for your data, no matter what form...
Like letters, network packets also have a form of addressing--after all, the network needs to know where and how to send these packets along their way! Each packet is marked with the IP (Internet Protocol) address of its destination computer, telling the network where the packet needs to go. Your Ethernet address comes in here as well, serving as an identification tag on every packet of data...
...Each packet is then whisked along over fiber optic lines to the router nearest you. There are six of them on campus, including one for the river houses, one for the Yard and one for the Quad. Think of a router as a "hub for hubs," taking all the packets from thousands of users and sending them along once more to the Science Center...
...this point, your data may go one of several ways. Say you've opened a telnet session to fas to read newsgroups. The Science Center router will see that the packet heading towards it is destined for "140.247.30.30," the IP address for the fas server. The router then dutifully sends your packet on to fas, which processes the data and sends a response packet...