How the Cold War Influenced the Birth of the World's Most Used Internet Protocol

dheeraj chowdary — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 07:07:33 +0000

It was the late 1960s — the Cold War was tense, and the U.S. Department of Defense needed a communication system that could survive even if parts of it were destroyed. This gave birth to ARPANET, the precursor to the internet.

Before ARPANET, computers were isolated islands. They didn’t communicate directly. Sharing data often meant:
Physically transporting tapes or punch cards
Dialing in over phone lines using slow modems .

ARPANET gave birth to packet switching.Instead of establishing a fixed circuit between two computers (like a phone call), ARPANET broke data into packets.Each packet could travel independently through the network and be reassembled at the destination.This was more resilient, efficient, and scalable.

But what language did these early machines speak?

Enter NCP — Network Control Protocol. It was like the first dialect spoken across ARPANET's connected universities and research labs. It allowed host A to talk to host B, but only if they were both on ARPANET.

NCP had limits:

It couldn’t reach beyond ARPANET — there was no internet yet.
It lacked mechanisms for reliable data delivery, leaving programs to handle errors themselves.

Each host was configured manually; if the network grew, so did the chaos.

What if we could link not just ARPANET machines, but machines on different types of networks — satellite, radio, and beyond?"

In this midst of this , Vinton G. Cerf (Vint Cerf) who was a computer scientist at Stanford University and Robert E. Kahn (Bob Kahn) who worked at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) proposed the idea of a universal protocol that could allow computers on any kind of network to communicate reliably.

In the early 1970s, Kahn was working on how to connect different types of computer networks (radio, satellite, ARPANET).

They are known as the “Fathers of the Internet.” They co-designed the TCP/IP protocol, which became the foundation for the modern Internet.

They published A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication in May 1974 .

It would:

Handle packet loss, reordering, and retransmission
Allow end-to-end communication between distant networks
Be modular, so it could work across any underlying hardware (radio, wire, satellite)

Later, they split it into two layers:

IP (Internet Protocol): The universal address system and routing engine
TCP: Reliable communication, flow control, and error recovery

It was as if they built a global postal system:

IP put addresses on envelopes
TCP made sure the letter arrived, uncrumpled, and in the right order

On January 1, 1983, ARPANET flipped the switch: NCP was turned off, and the world officially spoke TCP/IP.

In 2004, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn received the Turing Award for their foundational work on TCP/IP.

DEV Community: dheeraj chowdary

How the Cold War Influenced the Birth of the World's Most Used Internet Protocol

But what language did these early machines speak?

References