Weekly Topics - Week 2: Internet technologies from the past

The blogging task for this week is to write about two technologies from the earlier history of the Internet (before the Web, aka pre 1991 period) – one which has become obsolete and been replaced by more modern things, and another which survives to this day.

I am going to combine these two technologies and present and old one, which has been replaced by a more modern one. But let’s start chronological:

source: pixabay.com (free images)


The Network-Control-Program (NCP)

NCP was the Arpanets main protocol. If you don’t know what Arpanet is, I’ll give you a short introduction to that. Otherwise, you can just skip the next paragraph.

Arpanet stood as a foundation of the new Internet. The idea was “to build a network that established communication links between multiple resource-sharing mainframe supercomputers that were miles apart”. [1] By the end of 1969 a connection had been established between four nodes. Initially, the information shared was using circuit-switching, but its efficiency was not enough. Leonard Kleinrock, a researcher at MIT, found out, that packet-switching increases the efficacy. Packet switching breaks up information into small pieces and sends the information to be reassembled and displayed on a computer. [2]

Drawing of 4 Node Network
(source: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/brief-history-of-the-internet/)

Back to the NCP now. The NCP was the first protocol they used. The tasks of the NCP are to establish connections between two hosts, to terminate them or to redirect them. To be able to establish a connection at any time, a logger was integrated into the protocol. This service was looking for login attempts from other hosts. [3] But the problem was that NCP was not always reliable and it lost some packets over the way. This caused the protocol to stop and not do anything.

The Network Control Program was replaced on January 1, 1983, by its successor, the…


…TCP/IP

The TCP/IP Model (source: https://freelearningtech.in/what-is-tcp-ip-model/)

The TCP/IP is the family of network protocols on which the Internet is still based today. It was created in 1978 and further developed by Vint Cerf and Bob Khan. The name consists of the two most important internet protocols: The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) and the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) also belong to this group. Cerf explained the principles of TCP as following [1]:

"The job of TCP is merely to take a stream of messages produced by one Host and reproduce the stream at a foreign receiving Host without change. [1]"

The protocols of the TCP/IP model have one big advantage: they are able to work independently of the hardware and the software. No matter what operating system you use and what device you use to communicate over the network, the protocols are standardized to work in any context [4]. This makes the TCP/IP way more secure than the original NCP. NCP was still used, but it was acting as a driver for the new TCP/IP to be used on.

By the way: The January 1, 1983, when the NCP was replaced by TCP/IP, is known as the Flag Day (aka switchover day). And the switchover was complex: Since you can't use the different protocols side by side, it is not possible for hosts using NCP to communicate with hosts using TCP/IP. Therefore, it was necessary to start up the entire network on the day of the switchover. [3]

See you next week!

Sources:

[1] https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/brief-history-of-the-internet/

[2] http://historyofinterenetlg.weebly.com/early-stages.html

[3] https://www.ionos.de/digitalguide/websites/web-entwicklung/arpanet-definition-geschichte-des-internetvorgaengers/

[4] https://www.ionos.de/digitalguide/server/knowhow/tcpip-vorgestellt/

 

 

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