Why has the TCP/IP become the most predominant architecture found in networks today?
Because TCP/IP originated long before personal computers and workstations, in the days when network computers were all multi-user minicomputers and mainframes with many dumb terminals attached, some TCP/IP terminology is different from terminology that has been used in this course. Because every network node “hosts” many users on dumb terminals, TCP/IP uses the term host in the same sense as node has been used in this course. To remain consistent with the rest of the course, we will continue to use the term node in this unit. If you encounter the term “host” in other materials written about TCP/IP, you can mentally substitute the term “node.” The TCP/IP and Subnets diagram below shows the relationship between networks, subnets and nodes. Figure 7-1. TCP/IP and Subnets The extent networks would proliferate could not have been foreseen by the early architects of ARPANET. LANs had not been invented at that time. The Internet addressing scheme that they devised, consisting of only a networ
