History of TCP/IP

• TCP/IP was initially designed to meet the data

communication needs of the U.S. Department of
Defence (DOD).
• In the late 1960s the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA, now called DARPA) of the U.S.
Department of Defence began a partnership with
U.S. universities and the corporate research
community to design open, standard protocols
and build multi-vendor networks
• Together, the participants planned ARPANET, the
first packet switching network. The first
experimental four-node version of ARPANET went
into operation in 1969. These four nodes at three
different sites were connected together via 56
kbit/s circuits, using the Network Control Protocol
(NCP). The experiment was a success, and the trial
network ultimately evolved into a useful
• operational network, the "ARPA Internet".
• In 1974, the design for a new set of core protocols, for the
ARPANET, was proposed in a paper by Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E.
Kahn.
• The official name for the set of protocols was TCP/IP Internet
Protocol Suite, commonly referred to as TCP/IP, which is taken
from the names of the network layer protocol (Internet protocol
[IP]) and one of the transport layer protocols (Transmission
Control Protocol [TCP]).
• TCP/IP is a set of network standards that specify the details of how
computers communicate, as well as a set of conventions for
interconnecting networks and routing traffic.
• The initial specification went through four early versions,
culminating in version 4 in 1979.