What is a Data Packet?

When you send an email, read a news story on your computer or shop online, you’re sending information and getting information digitally, or electronically. It make look like you’re sending a whole photo of your new poodle to Aunt Jane and Uncle Louie across country, but it’s actually a collection of electronic data, in small pieces. A new concept? Not at all. Samuel Morse, for whom Morse code is named, sent the first telegraphic, and digital, message in 1838. Not 1938…1838! Morse used a series or dots and dashes to make letters, then words and sentences. But those were just electronic impulses that registered as noises. Zoom ahead to today (2014) and digital communications rule the day once more. But instead of messages that need to be captured and interpreted by humans, digital information is sent, received, “unscrambled” and presented on our computer screens for us to view, read and hear. And the innovation that makes it all possible is something called the digital “packet.” The networking protocols (TCP/IP) divide your message into small digital packets and send them out onto the Internet. When your packetized message arrives at its intended destination (such as a Website), TCP/IP on the receiving end reassembles the packets into your original message. Let’s look at the seven key points in a data transmission you might make—such as sending an email or making an Internet query to find a website—and see how packets play a role the entire time. Of course, the packet that matters the most for us is an Internet packet: when you send a request for information from a website, for instance. What’s absolutely amazing about all this is the speed in which all this takes place…mere seconds. When you open an application on your computer (host), such as an email program, and you compose a note and click on “send,” digital packets immediately travel through your computer, across network cables thousands of miles long, into the receiving computer/server, and into the appropriate program for translation. And the same happens in reverse just as fast. Mr. Morse would be impressed.