What were the major things that caused TCP/IP to become the internet standard protocol?
This had to be addressed, with so many people piling on and choosing that the OSI model was replaced by TCP/IP because it worked better and increased in popularity
DARPA Logo Defense Advanced Projects Administration
Okay I thought I'd share this recent post here on the #Fediverse. To give it some context, it's an answer to a common question, often a misunderstanding (even by many knowledgeable folks) as to just how we got here.
There's a lot of apples and oranges here. And everyone had a lot of good points made, but your question is simple, and has a very simple answer. I'll endeavor to address that directly, but do need to tend to some of what has already been said.
Scroll down to the tl;dr for the succinct answer of your question
Ethernet, ARCNET, Token Ring, Thick net (RG-59), Thin net (RG-58 A/U), and UTP (Cat 3, Cat 5, and Cat 6 unshielded twisted pair, Etc.) really have zero bearing on your question insofar as IP is concerned. All of these specifications relate to the definition of technologies that, although are indeed addressed in the OSI model which is indeed very much in use to this day,but are outside the scope of Internet Protocol. I'll come back to this in a minute.
It's quite common to say TCP/IP, but really, it's just IP. For example, we have TCP ports and we have UDP ports in firewalling. i.e., TCP is Transmission Control Protocol and handles the delivery of data in the form of packets. IP handles the routing itself so those messages can arrive to and from the end points. Uniform Data Protocol is another delivery system that does not guarantee arrival but operates on a best effort basis, while TCP is much chattier as it guarantees delivery and retransmission of missed packets - UDP is pretty efficient but in the case of say, a phone call, a packet here and there won't be missed by the human ear.
That's a very simplistic high level-view that will only stand up to the most basic of scrutiny, but this isn't a class on internetworking ;) If you just want to be able to understand conceptually, my definition will suffice.
Networking (LAN) topologies like Token Ring, ARCNET, and Ethernet aren't anywhere in the IP stack, but figure prominently in the OSI stack. I'm not going to go into the details of how these work, or the physical connection methods used like Vampire Taps, Thin net, or twisted pair with RJ-45 terminators, but their relationship will become obvious in a moment.
The OSI model unfolds like so, remember this little mnemonic to keep it straight so you always know:
> People Don't Need To See Paula Abdul
Okay, touched on already, but not really treated, is the description of that little memory aid.
> Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application layers (From bottom to top).
The physical and Data Link layers cover things like the cabling methods described above,and you're probably familiar with MAC Addresses (medium access control) on NICs (network interface controller). These correlate to the first two layers of the OSI stack, namely, the Physical (obvious - you can touch it), and the Data Link layer - how each host's NIC and switches on each LAN segment talk to each other and decide which packets are designated for whom (People Don't).
In software engineering, we're concerned mostly with the Session, Presentation, and Application layers (See Paula Abdul). Detailed explanation of these top three layers is outside the scope of this discussion.
The Beauty of the OSI model is that each layer on one host (or program) talks to exclusively with the same layer of the program or hardware on the other host it is communicating with - or so it believes it is, because, as should be obvious, is has to pass its information down the stack to the next layer below itself, and then when it arrives at the other host, it passes that information back up the stack until it reaches the very top (Abdul) of the stack - the application.
Not all communication involves all of the stacks. At the LAN (Local Area Network) level, we're mostly concerned with the Physical and Data Link layers - we're just trying to get some packet that we aren't concerned about the contents of from one box to another. But that packet probably includes information that goes all the way up the stack.
For instance, NIC #1 has the MAC: 00:b0:d0:63:c2:26 and NIC #2 has a MAC of 00:00:5e:c0:53:af. There's communication between these two NICs over the Ethernet on this LAN segment. One says I have a packet for 00:00:5e:c0:53:af and then two answers and says, "Hey that's me!" Nobody else has that address on the LAN, so they don't answer and stop listening for the payload.
Now for Internet Protocol (IP) and TCP/UDP (Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol):
IP corresponds to Layer 3 (Need) - the Network Layer of the **OSI Model.
TCP and UDP correspond to Layer 4 (To) - the Transport Layer of the OSI model.
That covers the entire OSI model and how TCP/IP correspond to it - almost. You're not getting off that easy today.
There's actually a bit of conflation and overlapping there. Just like in real life, it's never that cut and dried. For that, we have the following excellent explanation and drill down thanks to Julia Evans:
Layer 2 (Don't) corresponds to Ethernet.
Layer 3 (Need) corresponds to IP.
Layer 4 (To) corresponds to TCP or UDP (or ICMP etc)
Layer 7 (Abdul) corresponds to whatever is inside the TCP or UDP packet (for example a DNS query)
You may wish to give her page a gander for just a bit more of a deeper dive.
Now let's talk about what might be a bit of a misconception on the part of some, or at least, a bit of a foggy conflation between that of the specification of the OSI model and a Company called Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) a government contractor tasked with developing the IP stack networking code.
The TCP/IP you know and depend upon today wasn't written by them, and to suggest that it was the OSI model that was scrapped instead of BBN's product is a bit of a misunderstanding. As you can see from above, the OSI model is very much alive and well, and factors into your everyday life, encompasses software development and communications, device manufacturing and engineering, as well as routing and delivery of information.
This next part is rather opinionated, and the way that many of us choose to remember our history of UNIX, the ARPANET, the NSFnet, and the Internet:
The IP stack you know and use everyday was fathered by Bill Joy, who arrived at UC Berkeley in (IIRC) 1974), created vi because ed just wasn't cutting it when he wanted a full screen editor to write Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including TCP/IP, and co-founded Sun Microsystems (SunOS / Solaris):
> Bill Joy just didn’t feel like this (the BBN code) was as efficient as he could do if he did it himself. And so Joy just rewrote it. Here the stuff was delivered to him, he said, “That’s a bunch of junk,” and he redid it. There was no debate at all. He just unilaterally redid it.
Because UNIX was hitherto an AT&T product, and because government contracting has always been rife with interminable vacillating and pontificating, BBN never actually managed to produce code for the the IP stack that could really be relied upon. In short, it kinda sucked. Bad.
So! You've decided to scroll down and skip all of the other stuff to get the straight dope on the answer to your question. Here it is:
> What were the major things that caused TCP/IP to become the internet standard protocol?
The ARPANET (and where I worked, what was to become specifically the MILNET portion of that) had a mandate to replace NCP (Network Control Protocol) with IP (Internet Protocol). We did a dry run and literally over two thirds of the Internet (ARPANET) at that time disappeared, because people are lazy, software has bugs, you name it. There were lots of reasons. But that only lasted the better part of a day for the most part.
At that time the ARPANET really only consisted of Universities, big Defense contractors and U.S. Military facilities. Now, if you'll do a bit of digging around, you'll discover that there was really no such thing as NCP - that is, for the most part, what the film industry refers to as a retcon, meaning that we, as an industry, retroactively went back and came up with a way to explain away replacing a protocol that didn't really exist - a backstory, if you will. Sure, there was NCP, it was mostly a kludge of heterogeneous management and communications programs that varied from system to system, site to site, with several commonalities and inconsistencies that were hobbled together with bailing twine, coat hangers, and duct tape (for lack of a better metaphor).
So we really, really, needed something as uniform and ubiquitous as the promise that Internet Protocol would deliver. Because Bill Joy and others had done so much work at UC Berkeley, we actually had 4.1BSD (4.1a) to work with on our DEC machinery. As a junior member of my division, in both age and experience, I was given the task of, let's say throwing the switch on some of our machines, so to speak, when we cut over from the NCP spaghetti and henceforth embraced TCP/IP no matter what, on Flag Day - 01 January 1983.
So you see,the adoption of Internet Protocol was not a de facto occurrence - it was de jure, a government mandate to occur at a specific time on a specific day.
It literally had nothing to do with popularity or some kind of organic adoption, the erroneously described, so-called demise of the OSI model, or any physical network topology.
DARPA said 01 January 1983 and that's it, and that was it - Flag Day.
Sure, it took a few days for several facilities to come up (anyone not running IP was summarily and unceremoniously cut off from the ARPANET).
And one also needs to consider that it wasn't every machine - we only had some machines that were Internet hosts. We still had a lot of mainframes and mini computers, etc., that were interconnected within our facilities in a hodgepodge or some other fashion. Nowadays we have a tendency to be somewhat incredulous if every device doesn't directly connect over IP to the Internet in some way. That wasn't the case back then - you passed traffic internally, sometimes by unmounting tapes from one machine and mounting them on another.
There was a lot of hand wringing, stress, boatloads of frustration, and concern by people over keeping their jobs all over the world. But that's why and when it happened. Six months later in the UNIX portions of networks we had much greater stability with the release of 4.2BSD, but it wouldn't really be until a few years later Net2 was released that things settled down with the virtually flawless networking stability that we enjoy today.
Okay I thought I'd share this recent post here on the #Fediverse. To give it some context, it's an answer to a common question, often a misunderstanding (even by many knowledgeable folks) as to just how we got here.
There's a lot of apples and oranges here. And everyone had a lot of good points made, but your question is simple, and has a very simple answer. I'll endeavor to address that directly, but do need to tend to some of what has already been said.
Scroll down to the tl;dr for the succinct answer of your question
Ethernet, ARCNET, Token Ring, Thick net (RG-59), Thin net (RG-58 A/U), and UTP (Cat 3, Cat 5, and Cat 6 unshielded twisted pair, Etc.) really have zero bearing on your question insofar as IP is concerned. All of these specifications relate to the definition of technologies that, although are indeed addressed in the OSI model which is indeed very much in use to this day,but are outside the scope of Internet Protocol. I'll come back to this in a minute.
It's quite common to say TCP/IP, but really, it's just IP. For example, we have TCP ports and we have UDP ports in firewalling. i.e., TCP is Transmission Control Protocol and handles the delivery of data in the form of packets. IP handles the routing itself so those messages can arrive to and from the end points. Uniform Data Protocol is another delivery system that does not guarantee arrival but operates on a best effort basis, while TCP is much chattier as it guarantees delivery and retransmission of missed packets - UDP is pretty efficient but in the case of say, a phone call, a packet here and there won't be missed by the human ear.
That's a very simplistic high level-view that will only stand up to the most basic of scrutiny, but this isn't a class on internetworking ;) If you just want to be able to understand conceptually, my definition will suffice.
Networking (LAN) topologies like Token Ring, ARCNET, and Ethernet aren't anywhere in the IP stack, but figure prominently in the OSI stack. I'm not going to go into the details of how these work, or the physical connection methods used like Vampire Taps, Thin net, or twisted pair with RJ-45 terminators, but their relationship will become obvious in a moment.
The OSI model unfolds like so, remember this little mnemonic to keep it straight so you always know:
> People Don't Need To See Paula Abdul
Okay, touched on already, but not really treated, is the description of that little memory aid.
> Physical, Data Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, and Application layers (From bottom to top).
The physical and Data Link layers cover things like the cabling methods described above,and you're probably familiar with MAC Addresses (medium access control) on NICs (network interface controller). These correlate to the first two layers of the OSI stack, namely, the Physical (obvious - you can touch it), and the Data Link layer - how each host's NIC and switches on each LAN segment talk to each other and decide which packets are designated for whom (People Don't).
In software engineering, we're concerned mostly with the Session, Presentation, and Application layers (See Paula Abdul). Detailed explanation of these top three layers is outside the scope of this discussion.
The Beauty of the OSI model is that each layer on one host (or program) talks to exclusively with the same layer of the program or hardware on the other host it is communicating with - or so it believes it is, because, as should be obvious, is has to pass its information down the stack to the next layer below itself, and then when it arrives at the other host, it passes that information back up the stack until it reaches the very top (Abdul) of the stack - the application.
Not all communication involves all of the stacks. At the LAN (Local Area Network) level, we're mostly concerned with the Physical and Data Link layers - we're just trying to get some packet that we aren't concerned about the contents of from one box to another. But that packet probably includes information that goes all the way up the stack.
For instance, NIC #1 has the MAC: 00:b0:d0:63:c2:26 and NIC #2 has a MAC of 00:00:5e:c0:53:af. There's communication between these two NICs over the Ethernet on this LAN segment. One says I have a packet for 00:00:5e:c0:53:af and then two answers and says, "Hey that's me!" Nobody else has that address on the LAN, so they don't answer and stop listening for the payload.
Now for Internet Protocol (IP) and TCP/UDP (Transmission Control Protocol and User Datagram Protocol):
IP corresponds to Layer 3 (Need) - the Network Layer of the **OSI Model.
TCP and UDP correspond to Layer 4 (To) - the Transport Layer of the OSI model.
That covers the entire OSI model and how TCP/IP correspond to it - almost. You're not getting off that easy today.
There's actually a bit of conflation and overlapping there. Just like in real life, it's never that cut and dried. For that, we have the following excellent explanation and drill down thanks to Julia Evans:
Layer 2 (Don't) corresponds to Ethernet.
Layer 3 (Need) corresponds to IP.
Layer 4 (To) corresponds to TCP or UDP (or ICMP etc)
Layer 7 (Abdul) corresponds to whatever is inside the TCP or UDP packet (for example a DNS query)
You may wish to give her page a gander for just a bit more of a deeper dive.
Now let's talk about what might be a bit of a misconception on the part of some, or at least, a bit of a foggy conflation between that of the specification of the OSI model and a Company called Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) a government contractor tasked with developing the IP stack networking code.
The TCP/IP you know and depend upon today wasn't written by them, and to suggest that it was the OSI model that was scrapped instead of BBN's product is a bit of a misunderstanding. As you can see from above, the OSI model is very much alive and well, and factors into your everyday life, encompasses software development and communications, device manufacturing and engineering, as well as routing and delivery of information.
This next part is rather opinionated, and the way that many of us choose to remember our history of UNIX, the ARPANET, the NSFnet, and the Internet:
The IP stack you know and use everyday was fathered by Bill Joy, who arrived at UC Berkeley in (IIRC) 1974), created vi because ed just wasn't cutting it when he wanted a full screen editor to write Berkeley UNIX (BSD), including TCP/IP, and co-founded Sun Microsystems (SunOS / Solaris):
> Bill Joy just didn’t feel like this (the BBN code) was as efficient as he could do if he did it himself. And so Joy just rewrote it. Here the stuff was delivered to him, he said, “That’s a bunch of junk,” and he redid it. There was no debate at all. He just unilaterally redid it.
Because UNIX was hitherto an AT&T product, and because government contracting has always been rife with interminable vacillating and pontificating, BBN never actually managed to produce code for the the IP stack that could really be relied upon. In short, it kinda sucked. Bad.
So! You've decided to scroll down and skip all of the other stuff to get the straight dope on the answer to your question. Here it is:
> What were the major things that caused TCP/IP to become the internet standard protocol?
The ARPANET (and where I worked, what was to become specifically the MILNET portion of that) had a mandate to replace NCP (Network Control Protocol) with IP (Internet Protocol). We did a dry run and literally over two thirds of the Internet (ARPANET) at that time disappeared, because people are lazy, software has bugs, you name it. There were lots of reasons. But that only lasted the better part of a day for the most part.
At that time the ARPANET really only consisted of Universities, big Defense contractors and U.S. Military facilities. Now, if you'll do a bit of digging around, you'll discover that there was really no such thing as NCP - that is, for the most part, what the film industry refers to as a retcon, meaning that we, as an industry, retroactively went back and came up with a way to explain away replacing a protocol that didn't really exist - a backstory, if you will. Sure, there was NCP, it was mostly a kludge of heterogeneous management and communications programs that varied from system to system, site to site, with several commonalities and inconsistencies that were hobbled together with bailing twine, coat hangers, and duct tape (for lack of a better metaphor).
So we really, really, needed something as uniform and ubiquitous as the promise that Internet Protocol would deliver. Because Bill Joy and others had done so much work at UC Berkeley, we actually had 4.1BSD (4.1a) to work with on our DEC machinery. As a junior member of my division, in both age and experience, I was given the task of, let's say throwing the switch on some of our machines, so to speak, when we cut over from the NCP spaghetti and henceforth embraced TCP/IP no matter what, on Flag Day - 01 January 1983.
So you see,the adoption of Internet Protocol was not a de facto occurrence - it was de jure, a government mandate to occur at a specific time on a specific day.
It literally had nothing to do with popularity or some kind of organic adoption, the erroneously described, so-called demise of the OSI model, or any physical network topology.
DARPA said 01 January 1983 and that's it, and that was it - Flag Day.
Sure, it took a few days for several facilities to come up (anyone not running IP was summarily and unceremoniously cut off from the ARPANET).
And one also needs to consider that it wasn't every machine - we only had some machines that were Internet hosts. We still had a lot of mainframes and mini computers, etc., that were interconnected within our facilities in a hodgepodge or some other fashion. Nowadays we have a tendency to be somewhat incredulous if every device doesn't directly connect over IP to the Internet in some way. That wasn't the case back then - you passed traffic internally, sometimes by unmounting tapes from one machine and mounting them on another.
There was a lot of hand wringing, stress, boatloads of frustration, and concern by people over keeping their jobs all over the world. But that's why and when it happened. Six months later in the UNIX portions of networks we had much greater stability with the release of 4.2BSD, but it wouldn't really be until a few years later Net2 was released that things settled down with the virtually flawless networking stability that we enjoy today.
Ini 1972, Bob Kahn was "arranging for a professional film crew to create a thirty-minute-long 16mm movie explaining the Arpanet, complete with an electronic-synthesizer soundtrack to set an appropriately futuristic mood." -- #MichaelWaldrop in "The Dream Machine (2001)
📚 How the ARPANET Protocols Worked | Two-Bit History
「 The ARPANET protocols were, like our modern internet protocols, organized into layers.1 The protocols in the higher layers ran on top of the protocols in the lower layers. Today the TCP/IP suite has five layers (the Physical, Link, Network, Transport, and Application layers), but the ARPANET had only three layers—or possibly four, depending on how you count them 」
RIP the man who was the absolute incarnation of XKCD's "one random dude holding up the entire internet". You may never have heard of David Mills, but your entire goddamn world depends on what he did.
There he worked on synchronizing the clocks of computers connected to #ARPANET, inventing the Network Time Protocol. #NTP
He told The New Yorker in 2022 that he enjoyed working on synchronized time because no one else was working on it, giving him his own "little fief".
In the mid-2000s, Mills turned over full control of the NTP reference implementation to Harlan Stenn.
Mills was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force ( #GADS ) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.
He invented the DEC LSI-11 based #Fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), inspired the author of #ping for BSD (1983), and had the first #FTP implementation. He authored numerous #RFCs.
The first message between two computers on ARPANET was sent #OTD in 1969. The “LO” of “LOGIN” was successfully transmitted and then one of the systems crashed.
Charles Kline’s IMP Log: “Talked to SRI host to host.”
1973 #Ethernet as one of the defining information technologies in modern communication was developed at #PARC by Chuck Thackers for #Alto#Computer s. What Bob Metcalf, Butler Lampson, and Dave Boggs built for the #ARPAnet is connecting us all today— via the #Internet, & @fediverse.
This is a long shot, but does anyone have an account on telehack.com that could send me a referral code by using the ‘REFER’ command? The site is closed to new users unless an existing user gives a referral code.
@michaelgemar same same, but different 😜 "The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of #Defense.
Bob Taylor initiated the #ARPANET project in 📆 1966 to enable resource sharing between remote #computers 💻" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Look I've never been and will never be a #Programmer but I've been a user since the late 70's when my scout leader took us to his office in the Pentagon and showed us a green screen and typed a message to a friend in Hawaii. Nothing special but this was #ARPANET in 1978! So HelloWorld hits me in a very personal way.
Now if only the damn package I need actually worked!!
Just now I was making a post elsewhere about my having experienced a particular online social evolution pattern "since I was on the ARPANET". Along with my longstanding computer geekery, I'm a huge Tolkien fan, and it struck me that being a developer who used the ARPANET is equivalent to being an elf who lived under the light of the Two Trees in Valinor. In the late Third Age of Middle Earth, or in the 2020s, we are rare, wise, and immensely powerful. 🙂
The kids I grew up with knew I was "different", but my parents and school insisted I was normal. Now I've explored #Autism#Prosopagnosia#Alexithymia and #Aphantasia and have an idea what was going on, but then I thought everyone saw the world like I did, just coped better. I coped by becoming a #PluralSystem by age three when I realized my girl self would have to be hidden. After six "guy" IDs, I'm now back being that girl. Still running the system, but with more E and less T...
Despite all that, I've been online since #ARPAnet and #DJNR, wrote the first magazine article with simultaneous code distribution (via 8" floppies in the post), coded fab robots to move 6" & 8" Silicon wafers, built my (almost) independent #SolarPV and #SolarThermal house (7K lines of C++ from 1998, 42 device outs), and evolved an audio system with bandwidth from DC to a half MHz. Helped raise four unique kids, as adult minds in young bodies. Still mystify most of the adults I encounter...
「 “I thought 32 bits ought to be enough for Internet addresses.” “And of course,” he says, “everybody laughs and says, ‘You idiot, why didn’t you use 128-bit addresses?’ The answer is that, back in 1973, people would’ve said, ‘You’re crazy if you think you need 3.4 times 10 to the 38th addresses to do an experiment that you aren’t sure is going to work.’ So that was a mistake, although I don’t think at the time that I would have been able to sell 128.”」 #TCPIP#ARPANET
I've been giving #fish a try on a periodic basis every 6 months or so.
The pattern is always the same: I read an amazing article on how fish makes feature X easier/fancier than bash/zsh, I install it again, I spend half a day trying to export my two decades of bash/zsh customizations, and eventually I just give up overwhelmed by the amount of required work.
Fish is a great shell, but I don't know why they decided to go all the way and completely break the compatibility with anything that POSIX has produced over the past four decades.
I won't rewrite all of my shell functions, aliases, if statements, for loops, string concatenations, and/or conditions and environment variables to comply with a shell that is only compliant with itself, sorry. And I don't know why they decided to go the nuclear way and break compatibility so hard where they could have at least guaranteed a back-compatibility layer with (at least) zsh. Reinventing the whole wheel to make it look exactly the way you want, while disregarding compatibility with everything that already exists, is probably the biggest violation of the UNIX philosophy.
@blacklight@DrHyde@tyil The #JargonFile started being passed around and accumulating entries through the 1970s at #Stanford, #MIT, #CarnegieMellon, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and other pre-Internet computing centers. Some terms date back to the late 1950s MIT Tech Model Railroad Club, a very early progenitor of #hacker culture.