The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interconnected networks is called an internetwork, or simply an internet.
A datagram is a basic transfer unit associated with a packet-switched network. Datagrams are typically structured in header and payload sections. Datagrams provide a connectionless communication service across a packet-switched network. The delivery, arrival time, and order of arrival of datagrams need not be guaranteed by the network.
In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into short messages in fixed format, i.e. packets, that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.
The end-to-end principle is a design framework in computer networking. In networks designed according to this principle, guaranteeing certain application-specific features, such as reliability and security, requires that they reside in the communicating end nodes of the network. Intermediary nodes, such as gateways and routers, that exist to establish the network, may implement these to improve efficiency but cannot guarantee end-to-end correctness.
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.
Leonard Kleinrock is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Kleinrock made several important contributions to the field of computer science, in particular to the mathematical foundations of data communication in computer networking. He has received numerous prestigious awards.
Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
Paul Baran was an American-Jewish engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of modern digital communication.
The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.
The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with special-purpose interfaces and software. In later years the IMPs were made from the non-ruggedized Honeywell 316 which could handle two-thirds of the communication traffic at approximately one-half the cost. An IMP requires the connection to a host computer via a special bit-serial interface, defined in BBN Report 1822. The IMP software and the ARPA network communications protocol running on the IMPs was discussed in RFC 1, the first of a series of standardization documents published by what later became the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He directed the development of the CYCLADES computer network in France the early 1970s, which implemented a novel design for packet communication. He was the first to implement the end-to-end principle in a wide-area network, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.
Larry Roberts was an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer.
A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. Computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are made up of telecommunication network technologies based on physically wired, optical, and wireless radio-frequency methods that may be arranged in a variety of network topologies.
The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.
SATNET, also known as the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, was an early satellite network that formed an initial segment of the Internet. It was implemented by BBN Technologies under the direction of ARPA.
Roger Anthony Scantlebury is a British computer scientist and Internet pioneer who worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at Logica.
The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed standards and protocols for interconnection of computer networks. Set up in 1972 as an informal group to consider the technical issues involved in connecting different networks, its goal was to develop an international standard protocol for internetworking. INWG became a subcommittee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) the following year. Concepts developed by members of the group contributed to the Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication proposed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 and the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that emerged later.
The Protocol Wars were a long-running debate in computer science that occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s when it became the dominant protocol suite through rapid adoption of the Internet.
