Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)

Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is a suite of networking protocols that is valued for its capability to interconnect diverse computing platforms from PCs, Macintoshes, and UNIX systems to mainframes and supercomputers. The protocol suite originated from the work that was done by four key individuals more than 30 years ago: Leonard Kleinrock, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Lawrence Roberts. Each disagrees on who deserves the lion s share of credit in the development of the Internet. Although the early experiments of Kleinrock made his computer the first node on the early Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), Cerf and Roberts generally get the credit for designing the network architecture that eventually became known as the Internet.

The further development of TCP/IP was funded by the U.S. government s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the 1970s. As noted, the protocol suite was developed to enable different networks to be joined, in order to form a virtual network known as an internetwork. The original Internet was formed by converting an existing conglomeration of networks that belonged to ARPANET over to TCP/IP, which evolved to become the backbone of today s Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) oversees the development of the TCP/IP protocol suite.

Several factors have driven the acceptance of TCP/IP for mainstream business and consumer use over the years. These include the technology s capability to support local and wide-area connections, its open architecture, and a set of specifications that are...