This topic describes some of the basic ideas behind the TCP/IP family of protocols. For more detailed and comprehensive treatments of this subject, see the documents about TCP/IP listed in http://www.ibm.com/servers/eserver/zseries/zos/bkserv/

Like SNA, TCP/IP is a communication protocol used between physically separated computer systems. Unlike SNA and most other protocols, TCP/IP is not designed for a particular hardware technology. TCP/IP can be implemented on a wide variety of physical networks, and is specially designed for communicating between systems on different physical networks (local and wide area). This is called Internetworking.