A Brief History of TCP/IP

A Brief History of TCP/IP
The first Request for Comments (RFC) was published in April 1969, laying the groundwork for today’s Internet, the protocols of which are specified in the numerous RFCs monitored,
ratified, and archived by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). TCP/IP was first proposed in 1973 and was split into separate protocols, TCP and IP, in 1978. In 1983, TCP/IP
became the official transport mechanism for all connections to ARPAnet, a forerunner of the Internet, replacing the earlier Network Control Protocol (NCP). ARPAnet was developed by
the Department of Defense’s (DoD’s) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), formed in 1957 in response to the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik and later renamed the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which was split into ARPAnet and MILNET in 1983 and disbanded in 1990.
Much of the original work on TCP/IP was done at the University of California, Berkeley, where computer scientists were also working on the Berkeley version of UNIX (which eventually grew into the Berkeley Software Distribution [BSD] series of UNIX releases). TCP/IP was added to the BSD releases, which in turn was made available to universities and other institutions for the cost of a distribution tape. Thus, TCP/IP began to spread in the academic world, laying the foundation for today’s explosive growth of the Internet and of intranets as well.
      During this time, the TCP/IP family continued to evolve and add new members. One of the most important aspects of this growth was the continuing development of the certification and
testing program carried out by the U.S. government to ensure that the published standards, which were free, were met. Publication ensured that the developers did not change anything or
add any features specific to their own needs. This open approach has continued to the present day; use of the TCP/IP family of protocols virtually guarantees a trouble-free connection

between many hardware and software platforms.