In all honesty, not too many people care about that, but its a great question.
Most folks are just glad it DOES work, and they have no real interest in the wherefores and why’s.

The internet has become more and more popular the past few years, and its nearly impossible to view television, listen to the radio or read a book that doesn’t have a reference to some web site or another on the internet.

Since its become such a huge part of todays society, a reasonable understanding of how it functions is needed to make sure that you can use it as effectively as possible.

Because the internet is global, that is a whole world full of computers, with every one connected to the network, its largely like a world wide neighborhood.
Every computer, just like every house, needs to have its own address, or you can’t find it to deliver mail, or to send information.

The way thats done on the internet is with a series of numbers, called an IP address. IP stands for internet protocol.

Internet Addresses, or IP addresses are written as a series of numbers, in groups of three, and each number in the address has to be between 0 and 255.
For instance your IP address may be 000.444.555.666, but it will not be like another one out there. You can see, with the amount of numbers in the IP address, how many possibilities there would be for different IP addresses. Granted, given the internets growth, we have, and will run out of IP addresses, but each version of the internet,  offers us new amounts of addresses that can be used, much like building a new housing area, offers new streets and new numbers to the folks who buy a home there..

So you want to send a message to another computer. How do the two of them talk to each other?

Here is an oversimplified version of it..
If your Ip address.. or your computers phone number,for a better way to viewit.. is

5.4.3.2, and your neighbors computer address is 8.7.6.5,
just like with the phone, the message has to be transferred over wires..What that means is that the message has to go from voice or text,to electronic signal, and sent,then come back to  you using that same electronic signal, transferred into text.

This is done using whats called a protocol stack. Each computer needs one of those to talk in the internet and normally they are built into your operating system.

That protocol stack is essentially what changes the text to electronic signals and then back to a kind of text that you can read, and thats called the TCP/IP stack.

The TCP part of things directs the signals to a special place on the computer, called a port, while the IP sends them to a specific computer.

Now granted theres a bit more to it than that, but basically, thats how your computer sends and receives information from the internet back to you in a way that is able to be read by you.