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GCN Home > June 12, 2000 issue

Here’s all you need to know on TCP/IP

Here’s all you need to know on TCP/IP

Mail’s in—and the transport protocols delivered it and doublechecked that it arrived uncorrupted

By Carlos A. Soto
GCN Staff

TCP/IP. It stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. You’ve heard of it. You probably use it every day. But do you know how TCP/IP works?

To get on and navigate the Internet, your computer needs an IP address. Once you have an IP address, you use TCP/IP to surf the Web. But how?

A thorough explanation requires a little background. So, let’s go back a few decades.

In 1969 and 1970, programmers created the first computer language that let computers communicate. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency came up with the Network Control Protocol. It used NCP in the Internet’s prototype, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, which is better known as Arpanet.

Cold War baby



Arpanet was the first major WAN to link large universities, research labs and Defense Department facilities. It’s no surprise that Arpanet was born during the Cold War. Its creators wanted a resilient form of communication, something that could survive a nuclear attack.

From Arpanet came an Internet test bed comprised of researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of Utah.

Around that time, DARPA began issuing requests for comments on a host of new technologies.

The results of the RFCs quickly formed the basis for the standards that would define the Internet as we know it today.

Every standard received an RFC number. For example, the File Transfer Protocol, which in 1973 established a method for the transport of large data files across a network, is RFC-454.

Today things work a bit differently. The Internet Engineering Task Force, formed in 1990 as an international group that creates and maintains Internet rules and standards as part of the Internet Society and the Internet Architecture Board, uses RFCs to create rules and standards for the Net.

The task force, society and board consist of designers, vendors, network engineers and programmers in the computer industry from around the world. They review RFCs constantly and consider them for adoption as Internet standards.

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