THINK  Early Days Of TCP

• Introduction
  
• Timeline
  
• Annotated Bibliography
  
• Resources
  

A Technical History of TCP/IP

The Transmission Control Protocol was first formally specified in December of 1974 by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine. Early networking projects made it clear that to build a network of cooperating computers, a standard transmission protocol was necessary. TCP was designed to be flexible enough to handle the physical differences in host computers, routers, and networks in general, but still provide a standard to allow these physically different entities to be able to transmit data amongst themselves. Because of this design initiative, TCP is able to transfer data over networks which may support different packet sizes, which may on occasion lose packets, and networks which would otherwise be unable to mesh together and act as one network. However, its design was not a straightforward process, involving constant (and still continuing) modification and extension by users and administrators the world over. And so Inter-Networking was born...