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Evolution Of The Internet And Network Protocols

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The Evolution of the Internet and Network Protocols The internet has revolutionized the modern world like no other invention has before, except perhaps, electricity. The internet allows sharing and collaboration to take place between people on opposite sides of the globe. Vinton G. Cerf, often called the “Father of the Internet”, admits that when the original idea of an “intranet” was in its infancy, there was no possible way to imagine all of the ways we would come to use it (NDTV, 2013). But how does it work? The internet, based on the concept of “packet switching”, involves the travelling of small packets of data over one or more networks (Frenzel, 2013). This can be compared to “electronic postcards”, meaning that “a computer generates a piece of data and flings it into the net, just like the postal system, except 100 million times faster” (Cerf, 2013). This concept allows one computer to speak to many different computers around the network by sending out these “electronic postcards”. However, before these networks can work seamlessly together, they must use a common protocol, or set of rules for transmitting and receiving these packets of data. There are several protocols currently in use, including the OSI Model, the TCP/IP Model, UDP, HTTP, and FDP (Mitchell, 2014), but the most commonly used is Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) (Gilmer, 2011). Even as early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link to ARPANET (Kozierok,

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