MCUG Event: Understanding all the technology underlying a hyperlink click

The MIT Computer Users Group presents a talk by Anirudh Tomer and Toshish Jawale on what happens under the covers when you do something simple like clicking a hyperlink. The talk is at 1:30pm on Saturday, 20th August, in room A203, E&TC Dept. MIT, Kothrud.

About the Seminar:

To see this post you must have clicked a hyperlink, and it would have hardly took seconds to open that. So easy man!!!, but what you didn’t saw was how did the computer made this possible for you.

It all started at your Brain, here is the simple flow of all events that took place in LAYMAN’s TERMS

  1. Brain sends signals to your muscles to move the mouse on link and click on Mouse, your eyes help in that movement and tell brain to click at right place.
  2. Mouse sends interrupt via USB or PS2 to Host Controller.
  3. Host controller forwarded the interrupt to Processor.
  4. Processors sent interrupt to device driver.
  5. Device driver gave control to X server (i.e display server for Linux)
  6. X server gave control to browser
  7. browsers parses that link.
  8. browser contact network card via system calls and sent the request to FB server
  9. Routers take the packet from your network card and gave it to FB server.
  10. FB server processes the request and sends the reply back
  11. Browser gets the reply back and processes the HTML code to display the new contents.
  12. X server updates the video memory buffer with new contents
  13. Monitor reads the new content from that buffer and shows new content at screen, at 60HZ (say)
  14. Eyes get the same signal at 16HZ and send it to brain
  15. Brain processes the information and validates the information, if its the right one.

and all this happened in 1 second parallely, so A MOUSE CLICK IS SO COMPLEX. In this session we are going to cover all this in detail. Since this all started at brain and ends up at brain, we call it Brain to Brain

Who Can Attend

Anyone from this universe and its a free event. Goodies waiting for you as well. So if you are one of those who keeps the passion for understanding HOW STUFF WORKS, then this is a must attend session for you. Suggestions are most welcome

About MCUG – MIT Computer Users Group

MCUG (The MIT Computer Users Group) is a student group started by students and alumni of MIT College Pune, but has now grown to include 500+ members (students as well as industry professionals) from all over India. MCUG conducts various tech activities targeting students of computer science engineering.