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In its earliest forms, networking was government run or sponsored; in the United
States, the Department of Defense (DOD) sponsored the Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network (ARPANET), well before Al Gore’s time in politics, which will be
relevant in a moment. In 1969, ARPANET was deployed at the University of Califor‐
nia–Los Angeles, the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute,
the University of California–Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah School of
Computing. Communication between these nodes was not completed until 1970,
when they began using the Network Control Protocol (NCP). NCP led to the devel‐
opment and use of the first computer-to-computer protocols like Telnet and File
Transfer Protocol (FTP).
The success of ARPANET and NCP, the first protocol to power ARPANET, led to
NCP’s downfall. It could not keep up with the demands of the network and the vari‐
ety of networks connected. In 1974, Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine began
drafting RFC 675 for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). (You’ll learn more about
RFCs in a few paragraphs.) TCP would go on to become the standard for network
connectivity. TCP allowed for exchanging packets across different types of networks.
In 1981, the Internet Protocol (IP), defined in RFC 791, helped break out the respon‐
sibilities of TCP into a separate protocol, increasing the modularity of the network. In
the following years, many organizations, including the DOD, adopted TCP as the
standard. By January 1983, TCP/IP had become the only approved protocol on
ARPANET, replacing the earlier NCP because of its versatility and modularity.
A competing standards organization, the International Organization for Standardiza‐
tion (ISO), developed and published ISO 7498, “Open Systems Interconnection Ref‐
erence Model,” which detailed the OSI model. With its publication also came the
protocols to support it. Unfortunately, the OSI model protocols never gained traction
and lost out to the popularity of TCP/IP. The OSI model is still an excellent learning
tool for understanding the layered approach to networking, however.
In 1991, Al Gore invented the internet (well, really he helped pass the National Infor‐
mation Infrastructure [NII] Bill), which helped lead to the creation of the Internet
Engineering Task Force (IETF). Nowadays standards for the internet are under the
management of the IETF, an open consortium of leading experts and companies in
the field of networking, like Cisco and Juniper. RFCs are published by the Internet
Society and the Internet Engineering Task Force. RFCs are prominently authored by
individuals or groups of engineers and computer scientists, and they detail their pro‐
cesses, operations, and applications for the internet’s functioning.
Networking History | 3