The Internet & The TCP-IP

        I have been and will always be overwhelmed by the way this huge infrastructure called “Internet” works.  Formally the definition of Internet is “The network formed by the cooperative interconnection of a large number of computer networks”. Please mind the words “cooperative interconnection”, from which you can draw at least three inferences:
 

  1) That the two computers (or networks) first agree upon the fact that they wish to share data.

  2) That the language (technically called the protocol) that the two computers (or networks)             use to talk is same.

  3) And that you cannot identify a single owner of the Internet.

                    

The works in computer networks started in the late 1960s. The purpose was to connect certain computers so as to achieve certain goals and that’s too in the laboratories and research institutions. This gave rise to different islands of networks using different types of protocols (or you may call them rules) to let their computers communicate among themselves. This led to networks which were proprietary in nature and there was cross platform incompatibility. I mean to say that, an IBM (or DEC) computer can communicate with an IBM (or DEC) computer only. As, necessity (but you need to be crazy also) is the mother of all inventions, it was required to interconnect different types of networks to share more information and knowledge.

This requirement needs to have a globally single protocol and thus TCP-IP was born. Work on TCPIP began in the 1970s, by ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) and funded by US Military and thus the first network which used TCP-IP was called ARPANET. Gradually the use of TCP-IP as a protocol in networks increased and it became the de-facto protocol (the standard) of the whole internet we use today.  So, simply you can say that all the computers around the world speak the language of TCP-IP and if a computer does not understand TCP-IP it cannot communicate over Internet. That’s it!