Internet protocol

Background of Internet Protocols

In the mid-1970s, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) became interested in
establishing a packet-switched network to provide communications between research institutions in
the United States. DARPA and other government organizations understood the potential of
packet-switched technology and were just beginning to face the problem virtually all companies with
networks now have—communication between dissimilar computer systems.
With the goal of heterogeneous connectivity in mind, DARPA funded research by Stanford
University and Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) to create a series of communication protocols.
The result of this development effort, completed in the late 1970s, was the Internet Protocol suite, of
which the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) are the two best
known.
The Internet protocols can be used to communicate across any set of interconnected networks. They
are equally well suited for local-area network (LAN) as well as wide-area network (WAN)
communications. The Internet suite includes not only lower-layer specifications (like TCP and IP),
but also specifications for such common applications as mail, terminal emulation, and file transfer.