Transmission Control Protocol

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How does that web page you requested appear on your screen or that email to Aunt Lucy get there so fast and reliably? Well thanks to something called TCP/IP, and the US government who funded the research to develop it, we can communicate across the world in seconds. This amazing feat took years of research and the work of some very smart people in the Department of Defense whose job was to develop reliable and secure communications for the US Military. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol which basically is a set of rules or procedures that have been agreed on formally that define how telecommunications devices exchange data.
During this 20 year period ( 1969-1989), a division called DARPA along with the academic community invented packet switching technology that dramatically changed for the better how devices across different operating systems and platforms communicate. Up until then, a Store and Forward Network method was used which loaded a message one at a time with all the other messages waiting after it. Then the message would hop to the next node on the network repeating this until it reached its destination. The smaller messages were held up by the larger messages and one outage along the network made the whole network stalled. This method was very slow and expensive. Their idea was to break the message into parts called packets and each packet could be sent to different nodes over the network where all the packets would reach their correct destination in the correct order in a matter of seconds. The data would pass through mini computers called routers whose primary job it is to direct the message to the next closest or available server. Messages are also forwarded through gateways, a type of router which i...

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... drives resulting in long term storage of data. Packet switching was faster and cheaper and is still in use today. The researchers came up with a four part model called TCP/IP which broke down the complicated transmissions.into four layers They are the Link layer, the Internet layer, the Transport layer, and the Application layer. As a message is sent down the four layers it is addressed, packaged, and routed in the lowest level called the link layer. At the transport layer a session is established and data is transmitted between two hosts. At the application layer the data is then used by many applications such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP and DNS.
By breaking down the problem into simpler parts and making some layers responsible for specific duties, they were able to complete the challenge of connecting networks being able to transmit and exchange data.

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