ONCE UPON A TIME YOU LOADED A WEBPAGE
or Baby's First Primer to Modern Computer Functions Using Non-Technical Language: The Shit I Fucking Do For You People (but not like YOU people) I Swear
You get a notification that you’ve received a new email from https://probablynotfiction.com.
“Hell yeah,” you triumphantly whisper.
This notification is generated by Apple’s1 fleet of servers, which know to send a packet2 to your phone that lets your phone know to let you know that you have an email. The phone will usually not immediately fetch the email, but may during a scheduled background task. Obviously, if you click the notification, the email will be loaded.
You click the notification.
In your hand is a layercake of silicon [CIRCUIT], silicon [GLASS], copper, gold, platinum, and a lot more silver than you would expect.
Within, the wrath of the gods races, chained and caged to rails within a maze, and as it sprints, it knocks doors open and closed, and as the camera, directly above, looking straight down, as at the attosecond scale a charge potential speeds, trailing an afterimage and a preimage, its location within time itself not entirely certain, not at these scales, not when you’re watching it, the beasts knock the maze in to such a configuration as to complete a mathematical XOR3, and the next race can start.
Within a few milliseconds of clicking the notification, your phone has already formulated and started to send off “Hey my meatbag needs to read something”, which is handed over to the radio module, which runs its own tiny operating system and sends digital radio signals a few miles away to a tower.
The tower takes that radio signal (authenticated by a handshake you can learn more about in CRYPTO), translates it in to electrical impulses, then those electrical impulses either travel down copper, or are then translated to light, and travel down fiber.
In less time than it takes you to blink, your request has reached one of Apple’s servers4, and an answer begins to be generated.
This answer is usually generated by a series of servers working together.
The world-facing server, the server who lives at the address your phone found in the phonebook5 actually gets the request. This load-balancing server then goes “Oh, they want to load an email”, forwards that request on to many dedicated servers who actually hold the email (many servers with many copies, because even 1% downtime is about three full days of time out of a year), and then these servers respond to the load balancer with the email.
When things are working correctly, this usually happens in under 50 milliseconds6.
The load balancer then fires the email back through the network to your phone. I’m casually reducing a very complex process to a single sentence.
An electrical current flows up from a cell phone tower’s base station, climbing in to the air until it passes through resistors, capacitors and magnetic couplings to energize a complex conductive geometric shape that releases the excess energy as low-energy photons, far far below what the human eye can see, in to the air.
To be these photons, sleeting through their timeless world, is to be free the same way a man falling from a plane is free. They will pass through a snapshot until they are recaptured, whether by a macro-scale net, in a radio antenna, or by the hard small-scale fields that bind electrons to atoms.
At this energy level, it is not if the photon ends7, but how.
About 300 milliseconds have passed, which is how long a slower-than-average blink takes, roughly.8
Your phone screen flashes, and, with relish, you read another email from Your Humble Author.
If you’re going to say some exceedingly foolish thing like ‘Android is more secure!’ or any such, I’m going to throttle you, and the only cross that will ward me off is a Graphene installation that is using the system’s hardware security module which you have personally secured and verified.
Actually throttle you. Be warned.
So it’s actually a lot of packets over a single connection. You can learn more about how this happens by reading the Wikipedia (dogshit organization but slightly useful site) page here.
From Wikipedia:
Exclusive or, exclusive disjunction, exclusive alternation, logical non-equivalence, or logical inequality is a logical operator whose negation is the logical biconditional. With two inputs, XOR is true if and only if the inputs differ (one is true, one is false). With multiple inputs, XOR is true if and only if the number of true inputs is odd.
Trying to keep these reasonably spaced apart, that’s why this isn’t on the first instance of this word.
A ‘server’ is not meaningfully different in design form from your home desktop (epic gaming rig, whatever) or laptop, merely different in function and scale. The same core parts are still at hand. Think pickup truck versus an eighteen-wheeler. As always, this is a massive over-simplification.
I am massively over-simplifying the DNS system and modern IP routing. We’ll go over this at a future point, probably (TWO MORE WEEKS)
Milli means ‘one one-thousandth of’. SI Unit Prefix knowledge is mandatory, please go learn more here.
Their high-energy brothers, at the tops of the band, will fly through eternity to try to slam in to infinity.