TCP/IP

TCP/IP

History of the Internet

Before delving into the protocols that make up what we now consider the Internet, I will give you a sketchy background of how this beast came into being. Some time ago, in the late 1960s to be more exact, the U.S. Department of Defense funded an agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). They involved a few universities in the idea of connecting their computers together.

At the time, there were no protocols in use for data communications, so the participants in the project had to create their own. From them we have the precursors of TCP and IP, which are now the most prevalent protocols in the industry. The network created by ARPA was called ARPANET, and it was a fairly loosely controlled set of computers that were connected together.

The successor to ARPA, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) decided that it was not secure to have civilian and military machines on the same network. So they pulled their sites into a separate network called MILNET and left the remaining participants to work on their own under the auspices of the Internet Advisory Board (IAB). The IAB now oversees the work of the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Internet Protocol

The primary protocol we talk about in the Internet world is the Internet protocol (IP). In the OSI model it would be classified as a network-level protocol, since it takes care of routing packets from...

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