One click, every layer (what happens when you load a page)

One parcel tracked from a laptop to example.com. This lesson follows the same trip again, and this time stops at every counter the parcel passes on the way.

Before you start. This lesson holds the whole track at once. The concierge who turns a name into an address is DNS Resolution. The depots that pass a parcel one hop closer are How a parcel finds any house on earth, the doorman in your own building is Inside your building (your router's life), and one address answering from many buildings is One address, a thousand doors. The phone call and its three-message handshake are TCP vs UDP, and the 3-way handshake, and how it recovers a lost page is The page that never arrived (TCP reliable delivery). The whisper code is The whisper code (how a call goes private), the words of the order are What a request actually says (HTTP), one line shared by many orders is How the web outgrew the phone call, and a sender starting almost silent is Reading a book aloud to America.