gawkinet: Stream Communications

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1 1.1 Reliable Byte-streams (Phone Calls)
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1 When you make a phone call, the following steps occur:
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1   1. You dial a number.
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1   2. The phone system connects to the called party, telling them there
1      is an incoming call.  (Their phone rings.)
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1   3. The other party answers the call, or, in the case of a computer
1      network, refuses to answer the call.
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1   4. Assuming the other party answers, the connection between you is now
1      a "duplex" (two-way), "reliable" (no data lost), sequenced (data
1      comes out in the order sent) data stream.
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1   5. You and your friend may now talk freely, with the phone system
1      moving the data (your voices) from one end to the other.  From your
1      point of view, you have a direct end-to-end connection with the
1      person on the other end.
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1    The same steps occur in a duplex reliable computer networking
1 connection.  There is considerably more overhead in setting up the
1 communications, but once it's done, data moves in both directions,
1 reliably, in sequence.
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