@noracodes as someone who is really not a programmer but very definitely something resembling a network engineer, the way you've defined the audience here is breaking my brain a little bit

I guess I see the idea behind using "programmer" as the catch-all term to refer to people who work or tinker with IT, but at the same time this feels like a very familiar type of, uh, "IT erasure" (I last had to explain I do not write code despite studying IT to someone last week)

@noracodes
The "coding" I do in my free time is mostly just shell scripts but I never learned networking so perhaps I fit this.

I know first there's a DNS lookup to get the IP address of the site to connect to. I'm not familiar with how TCP/IP works but I know there's a http handshake and for https a TLS handshake where asymmetric keys are exchanged that are used to encrypt packets. The browser then requests the page, receives the data and renders it, plus it executes JS.

@noracodes i'm a programmer *now* and have also set up servers, but I can tell you about *before*, when i was a kid:

i've been computering most of my life, and somehow never got weirded out by the dos prompt, just accepted that you can type a specific command that makes it go, no conceptual difference with a button, really.

so fastforward to Internet Explorer 3, i also just accepted that you can type a command (the url) an have the program do a thing, just getting it from "The Online".

@noracodes I think:
I type the letters

My browser sends that to a DNS server which turns the letters into a code, either in IpV4 (xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) or IPV6 (nope, no clue, but the numbers are in hex)

The browser then asks to connect to the server which has that address, and either gets accepted or denied. If the former, the browser and server start exchanging data directly through the Series Of Pipes.

(no, hands, not the Series of Popes)

@noracodes
I'm not sure I count for this, I run a git for a nodecg package and admin a mastodon instance, but adamantly don't program.

>Type address, press enter
>browser checks with dns for ip
>redirects to ip
>recieves HTML and CSS
>downloads JS and Media
>renders webpage

@noracodes My concept of what happens is that the browser sends the URL to my ISP, then the ISP sends it along with my IP address to a DNS server, which basically just a fancy automated lookup table that matches URLs to IP addresses, which then sends my IP address to whatever device the actual website is on. Then that device sends the source code and assets needed to make the site work all the way back through that whole process to my computer, where the code is compiled by my browser, then run.

I think I got most of the basics down? There were some bits that I actually didn't get until I started typing it out and then added later.

@noracodes

Well, isn't it obvious what happens? The searcher living in my browser goes out and hunts down the site I'm looking for, then builds a pipeline to feed the little electron bits from their server to my browser, where the searcher puts them all together in the right order so I can see it. They're very fast, these browser searchers.

(Actually I've been interneting since the early 90s, and have set up a few DNS in my time, but that was long ago, and in another life.)

@noracodes I, at max experimenting with shell scripts, like to add:
- the browser does performs some computation, that appears somehow as machine commands, juggling various storages and CPU capacities. All of this requires some electricity.
- routers, switches, etc on the way are also computers that, like before, perform some computation, requiring energy.
- tbc.
#carbon

Handshakes confuse me: are the pipes broad enough for cats, mice, etc to actually conduct magic rituals? Do they have hands?