Windows Sockets

Sockets are a concept developed at the University of California at Berkeley to add network communication support to the UNIX operating system. The API developed there is now known as the “Berkeley socket interface.”

Sockets and TCP/IP

Sockets are generally, but not exclusively, used in conjunction with the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that dominates Internet communications. The Internet Protocol (IP) part of TCP/IP involves packaging data into “datagrams” that contain header information to identify the source and destination of the data. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) provides a means of reliable transport and error checking for the IP datagrams.

Within TCP/IP, a communication endpoint is defined ...

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