History of TCP/IP and the Internet

TCP/IP has become the de-facto protocol for computers to talk to each other over networks and the Internet. How did this come to be the most used protocol ever? First let's look at the history of the Internet and tcp/ip. They are intermingled together such that it is impossible to talk about one without the other.

First we go back to the late 60's and early 70's. There were NO desktop computers as we think of them today. Most of the computers were mainframes at either very large companies, or the Government facilities. Most of them were either military or at universities. There were several different brands/types. You had UniVac's, IBMs, Burroughs, etc. There were NO standards for these computers, so them swapping data was a very tough proposition at best. It involved saving data to a huge tape spool in a decided upon format, then shipping this data to the other computer, and uploading it. Very expensive, time consuming, and not very efficient.

The government wanted a way to share data between these very different systems in which they had invested a lot of money to develop. That is the reason they funded the development of a networking protocol that has become tcp/ip. This work was done by a government agency named DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects). This work not only developed TCP/IP, but started the Internet.

The Internet was in the beginning, a WAN[1] network used by universities and military institutions. There were no private connections to the Internet, and the idea behind the Internet was to develop a network that even if part of the network was destroyed by an enemy, there was redundant paths that would continue to send the information. So, tcp/ip and the Internet were actually products of the cold war.

This is why no one owns tcp/ip, and it is a free protocol to use and distribute, unlike many of the other proprietary protocols that have come and gone over the years (Appletalk, Novell IPX/SPX, Arpnet, IBM token ring, etc). One of the specifications that was listed for the development of tcp/ip was that the protocol had to be hardware independent. Remember, the entire idea was to connect different hardware platforms together. This is why tcp/ip can be used by every operating system and every hardware platform in existence today.