Chapter 3: The logical network
Posted by Mungo under Chapter 3 on February 26th, 2007.Communication is only possible when the participants speak a common language. But once the communication becomes more complex than a simple ongoing broadcast, protocol becomes just as important as language. All of the people in an auditorium may speak English, but without a set of rules in place to establish who has the right to use the microphone, the communication of an individual’s ideas to the entire room is nearly impossible. Now imagine an auditorium as big as the world, full of all of the computers that exist. Without a common set of communication protocols to regulate when and how each computer can speak, the Internet would be a chaotic mess where every machine tries to speak at once.
TCP/IP refers to the suite of protocols that permit conversations to happen on the global Internet. By understanding TCP/IP, you can build networks that will scale to virtually any size, and will ultimately become part of the global Internet.
