INTERNET PROTOCOLS

Standards,standards everywhere?There's an old joke that a giraffe is actually a horse designed by committee and that animal we call networking has had its share of committees and standards over the years.Actually, the standards committees have done a great job.The standards and protocols that define the main networking protocols function pretty well, in part due to the modular nature of the key networking protocols. A protocol is simply a language computers use to speak to eachother.
Each protocol handles a specific set of tasks and as network standards have matured, the standards committees have been able to add improvements without rewriting the entire ''network stack''.
Most of computer users just know how to browse through the Internet,sent mails etc without realising what really goes on for them to receive those mails or send them.Take a key press as an example.First the keyboard controller chip in your PC senses that you have pressed a Key and works out which one.Next,the keyboard controller turns this information into a scan code ,a piece of data that represents the key you pressed and stores it in a small block of memory called a buffer .The Pc's operating system then checks the keyboard buffer for data,sees that something is in there and reads it.Finally,tha data is passed back to the application currently wailting for input,whre the keyboard data is analyzed and acted upon-maybe adding a character to a document or completing a password entry sequence.All the way through this process,things must happen just so,or the process won't work properly;in other words,there are protocols involved.To handle input from the keyboard,for instance,severial protocols and standards are in place to eliminate potential problem.This process is just for the keyboard now imagine more complicated processes,this is where now we see the importance of these protocols.
The three most popular protocol families mostly encountered in the real world are NetBEUI,IPX/SPX, and TCP/IP.