IPv4 - Brief History

IPv4 (IP) - A Brief History

At the end of the 1960's there was a great demand in various US universities and research centres for a network that should permit nationwide utilization of existing computer resources. In addition to that there was the desire for data exchange. On the other hand there was the interest in practical experiences, design, implementation, the use of network techniques in general and packet-switching in particular.

So the Advanced Research Project Agency, an US government organisation, started developing a net called ARPANET. From 1972 the Advanced Research Project Agency dealt with research projects of military interests and ARPANET was renamed DARPA.

The first proposal was made in 1968. The contract was won in December 1968 by the company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN).

The demands for file transfer, remote login and email were on top of the list for NCP (Network Control Protocol, the predecessor of TCP/IP). The first use of ARPANET was in 1971.

In 1973, a project was started, developing new lower layer protocols because the existing layers had become functionally inadequate. So Cerf and Kahn specified the following goals for the lower layer protocols in 1974:

independence from underlying network techniques and from the architecture of the host
universal connectivity throughout the network
end-to-end acknowledgments
standardized application protocols

In 1981 the TCP/IPv4 was standardized in ARPANET RFC's.

The success of TCP/IP in the UNIX world was largely a result of the fact that the University of California in Berkeley undertook an implementation of TCP/IP in their 4.2 BSD UNIX in 1983 and made the source code available as public domain software. Corrections and optimizations were made in later versions of BSD (4.3 BSD (1986) and 4.3 BSD/Tahoe (1988)).