The industry skipped from IPv4 to IPv6, leaving IPv5 and the Internet Stream Protocol to the annals of history
37 years ago this week, the Morris worm infected 10% of the Internet within 24 hours
TCP/IP was designed by Dr. Vinton Cerf and Dr. Robert Kahn . It’s layered design also introduced innovations that would become essential to the evolution of the Internet. It boasted features like congestion control, end-to-end reliability, and would spawn future Internet-essential service protocols like HTTP, SMTP, DNS, and more.
IBM famously described the era’s networking landscape as being like a Tower of Babel, with so many incompatible proprietary protocols clamoring for users. However, its own solution, dubbed SNA, was part of this proprietary problem. Similarly, Xerox would push forward the adoption of its XNS, and DEC its DECnet.
In contrast, the open, scalable, and hardware-agnostic TCP/IP managed to get a clear run at widespread adoption, and succeeded. One could say it won – not by being the best protocol designed to connect everything – but by being the only one. Additionally, its open and free nature, ability to run on everything from PCs to supercomputers , allowed it to become the common denominator among a throng of multiprotocol network routers . These all added fuel to TCP/IPs success.
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Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/arpanet-standardized-tcp-ip-on-this-day-in-1983-43-year-old-standard-set-the-foundations-for-todays-internet#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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