This Week in NET: 50th Anniversary of the TCP Paper

This is a special feature that celebrates the 50 years of the “TCP paper.” We asked a few questions to three of our team members who are experts in protocols about why the TCP protocol is important for what the Internet has become, its evolution over the years with new additions, and also its future.

Participating are Mark Nottingham, our Standards Lead, based in Australia; Marwan Fayed, a Systems Engineer from our Research team, usually in the UK but here in Lisbon, Portugal; and Lucas Pardue, a senior software engineer specializing in Internet and web protocols such as HTTP/2, HTTP/3, and QUIC — Lucas is Co-Chair within the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) Working Group.

Some context: In May 1974, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Transactions on Communications scientific journal published “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” Authored by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, that was the paper that described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that supported the interconnection of multiple packet-switched networks into a network of networks. Split later into TCP and an Internet Protocol (IP), TCP and IP became core components of the Internet that DARPA launched operationally in 1983. The rest, as they say, is history.

Mentioned topics:

• What is TCP/IP?
• TCP - The Cloudflare blog
• The TCP paper — “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication”