Technology Overview History In the early days of supercomputers, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) sought to develop a technology that would allow geographically separated researchers to share these powerful and expensive computer resources. The result of these early efforts was the development of ARPANET, the forerunner of today's Internet. With great insight, or perhaps by a stroke of luck, government bureaucrats soon recognized that the network was becoming an increasingly valuable communication resource for academic types who were not directly involved in defense-related research. Rather than impose greater restrictions on use, the government actually broadened the reach of the ARPANET by establishing a separate defense-oriented network and funding the development of both a backbone and regional networks through the National Scien ce Foundation (NSF). These early years were quite exciting for the Internet pioneers as some of the nation's brightest technical minds focused their attention on building the software and hardware needed to evolve this initial experiment into a global network. Significant debate took place through the 1980s regarding "appropriate use" of these network resources. Early on, the NSF developed usage guidelines that precluded the use of the Internet's primary backbone facilities for commercial purposes. Today, a transformation has taken place that has facilitated the use of the network by businesses, while spurring an active industry of commercial ISPs, including such telecommunications giants as MCI and Sprint, which are actively constructing high-speed global networks that are branches of the Internet. Increased competition among commercial service providers, coupled with maturing hardware and software technologies, has resulted in an open market that gives businesses a variety of options for connecting to the Net. TCP/IP The fundamental technology at the root of the Internet is a set of communication protocols known as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, more familiarly known as TCP/IP. TCP/IP's three main characteristics are rich functionality, openness and pervasiveness. Its functionality is well documented, the result of a flexible design that has allowed it to evolve to meet new needs. As an open communications standard, TCP/IP is not controlled by any single company, a characteristic that makes it appealing to many organizations that wish to preserve flexibility in where they purchase their computer and hardware. The pervasiveness of TCP/IP is probably its biggest asset for in today's market, a computer company can't sell its products effectively if it lacks support for TCP/IP. That means chances are very good that whatever computer equipment your business has today can be linked to the Internet using TCP/IP. If it can't, you've probably got a serious problem on your hands. The TCP/IP protocol suite got its name from its two most important protocols, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). The IP datagram is the most basic communication element within TCP/IP, consisting primarily of source and destination address information and application data. IP datagrams are transmitted from source to destination using routers-computers that are optimized to select the most efficient path through a network as complex as the Internet. To accomplish this, routers use special routing protocols. However, IP has no provisions to guarantee that data will reach its destination. That's the job of TCP, which includes information that applications depend upon to ensure delivery of data. Other Protocols By now, it probably seems obvious that to connect to the Internet, your desktop computer must support TCP/IP. However, while this is the norm in most cases, it's not a necessity. For example, you could use a modem and communications software to dial into a computer system that supports TCP/IP and thereby gain access to the Internet. This is the norm today for connecting to the Internet through online services like CompuServe. Or you might have a NetWare LAN running Novell's IPX protocol and gain access to the Internet via a gateway that converts IPX datastreams to IP datastreams. As we will see later, these approaches have some advantages for both security and administrative reasons. Next Return to Table of Contents November 15, 1996 Print This Page E-mail this URL