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THINK Early Days Of TCP
Timeline
Annotated Bibliography
Resources
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| 1973 |
"A Partial Specification
of an International Transmission Protocol" is written by Vint
Cerf. This paper first makes a reference to TCP. Fragmentation and
reassembly of messages, formerly done by node computers on the network,
become the responsibility of host computers.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn
write "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection", which is later
published in 1974. This is the most detailed TCP outline to this point,
and precursor to the first official specification. |
| 1974 |
December: A 3-way
handshake is adopted for TCP. Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine
write RFC
675, the first complete specification of TCP. The authors
describe TCP in great depth, giving exact specifications for all
elements of the Transmission Control Program. |
| 1975 |
July:
V. Cerf, A. McKenzie, R. Scantlebury and H. Zimmerman write
"Proposal For An Internetwork End to End Protocol".
The authors propose for a host to host protocol for computer
networks being developed all over the world. |
| 1976 |
October:
Birchfiel, Plummer and Tomlinson write IEN 18, "
Proposed
Revisions to the TCP" which proposes changes to the TCP
previously specified in
RFC 675. Tomlinson discovered that the first design of TCP
lacked and needed a three-way handshake in order to distinguish
the start of a new TCP connection from old random duplicate
packets that showed up too late from an earlier exchange. |
| 1977 |
March: Cerf
writes IEN 5, "
TCP Version 2 Specification" .
July: The triple
network Internet is demonstrated for the first time. Cerf, Kahn
and others link up 3 networks using TCP: packet radio, ARPANET
and SATNET. Messages travel 94,000 miles from San Francisco to
London to California "without dropping a single bit".
August: Jon Postel writes
IEN 2, in which
he disusses internet protocol as being formed by two components: a hop
to hop oriented protocol, and an end to end oriented protocol. |
| 1978 |
January: Cerf and Postel
write IEN 21, "TCP
Version 3 Specification"
which begins the splitting of TCP into TCP/IP. IP becomes in
charge of routing the packets, while TCP takes care of
packeting, error control, re-transmission and reassembly. TCP/IP
enables fast and inexpensive gateways to be built. Jon Postel writes
the fourth version specification for both TCP and IP. This is the
first time IP has it's own formal specifcation. No less than five
2-day meetings are held this year to discuss TCP. Jon Postel writes
the meeting notes, which are in IEN's 65-69. |
| 1979 |
Postel writes new specifications for TCP and IP which show up
in IEN's 123,
124,
127,
128. |
| 1980 |
January: RFC's
760 and
761 outline new
specifications for the two protocols.
Febuary: TCP/IP becomes the
preferred military protocol. |
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