ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Packet writing

Imagine you are sending a letter to your friend. You write the letter on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope. Then you write your friend's address on the envelope and put a stamp on it. The postman takes the envelope and delivers it to your friend.

Now, imagine if you could send parts of the letter to your friend as soon as you finish writing them, instead of waiting to write the whole letter and sending it in one envelope. This is kind of like what packet writing is.

In computer terms, when you send information over the internet, it's broken up into small chunks called packets. Each packet contains a piece of the information and some information about where it's going (like your friend's address on the envelope).

Packet writing is when your computer writes each packet to a disc like a CD or DVD individually, instead of waiting to write them all at once. Think of it like writing parts of your letter on different sheets of paper and putting them in an envelope as soon as you finish each part.

This way, if your computer crashes or something goes wrong while you're writing the information, you don't lose everything. Your information is saved in the packets that you've already written to the disc.

So, in short, packet writing is a way to write data to a disc in small pieces, making it more reliable and easier to manage.