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What is this mystical network!

There is a lot written about networks but most of the times when it comes to
Basic questions like "What is a network?"(in regards to information technology), most of us will end up saying "A group of different devices that can intercommunicate in an intelligent manner (of-course you may find some that can only give you a shrug,like me)".

When I asked myself all I got were random images of pcs and boxes connected via lines, bolts and clouds.

Actually what we should concentrate on is what the network does instead of what the network really is?
I still remember asking my high school teacher about this cloud. All I was told was that it's Internet: network of networks.
Most of us will be pretty satisfied with the above definition of network but read it again, it tells us about what network is made of, and not what network exactly is.
Let's take an example from the latest movie I watched, Shrek: the far away kingdom, where King stamps a letter and give it to the horsemen, and he would run across all these roads and deliver it to the people. This whole function that I described above where a king stamp a letter, give to the horsemen to be delivered is an application that runs across the network, you know what the network is, the ROADS that the horsemen used.
People say Rome was so great, ever wondered why was Rome great, because they built roads, they built ways to get to places that's what the network is.
Let's consider another example of London tubes (underground rail system of London). Thousands of people use tubes every day and it connects various locations same as a network do to our LAN, WAN or even Internet. But the network is not the places it connects to, nor it refer to the people using it.
The network is actual the rail system, trains and to an extent the control system in place for these trains to work.

I think that's enough to give you a glimpse of ever baffled picture to network.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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