Excellent description. I often use the metaphor of an apartment building's mailboxes with "the internet" (really, the network elements, obv) being the postal service, the building being the IP address and the mailboxes being the ports, mapped to services/programs. So far, it's worked pretty well. This also lets me extend the discussion to TCP vs UDP, where I compare UDP to simply mailing a letter and TCP to requiring a signature verifying receipt.

>socket

Just in case anyone's not seen the term 'socket' before: this is a logical address comprised of the IP address and port. So, for instance, if you have a web server listening on port 80 on your local loopback interface with IP address 127.0.0.1, you can connect to the webserver via the socket with address 127.0.0.1:80

37 Years! That's both a lot of dedication and a very resilient box. Bravo.