TCP/IP (Network Protocol)

TCP /IP

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16 March 2007

1290 words

In its earliest years - before it became international - the Internet was a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United States and a related set of innovative computerbased communications techniques that made possible some networking experiments with advanced computer sites in Europe (Abbate , 1999 . But the reach of the original Internet was limited because networks could initially be built only between specific and highly reliable computer systems . Although the history of the Internet itself can be

traced to the 1960s or perhaps even earlier , the development of the international regime for the Internet began with the acceptance of the first Transmission Control Protocol /Internetwork Protocol (TCP /IP ) as a de facto worldwide standard in the 1980s and 1990s

By the early 1970s computer networking capabilities had expanded to the point where many founders of the Internet could conceive of building a worldwide network of subsidiary computer networks and even individual computers . The major problems involved in building an overall international network had to do with , first , the lack of a practical design for a universal host protocol that would work on both reliable and unreliable networks and , second , methods of attaching specific networks - located in almost 200 countries - to each other (Quarterman and Hoskins , 1986 . Although communication by e-mail among computer users was becoming more common in the mid-1970s , a person could still only send a message to another person who was connected to a single discrete network . The key breakthrough in creating the possibility of connecting all networks and computers throughout the world occurred at a meeting organized by Vinton Cerf at Stanford University in 1973 when all academic , government , military , and commercial groups with substantial interest in computer networking at that time were able to assemble in one place and , in Janet Abbate 's words , to find enough common ground to define an approach on which most of them could agree (Abbate , 1999 br

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The internationalizing approach agreed to at Stanford in 1973 was to accept a particular host protocol - Transmission Control Protocol (TCP - as the standard that could provide an ly , error-free flow of data from one host computer to another , both within and between networks . The TCP was chosen from a number of other options and was distinguished because it provided for the most open and , in the words of its designers , seamless ' system . In Cerf 's words , We wanted to have a common protocol and a common address space so that you couldn 't tell , to first , that you were actually talking through all these different kinds of nets (Cerf , 1990 . The alternative to TCP would have been a system (or systems ) of networking that would have required various mechanisms for translating among them , most of which were the proprietary interests of commercial companies . Such an alternative would have been anything but seamless

Agreement to use the original TCP protocol was further refined at a January 1978 meeting at the...