Berkeley socket

The Berkeley socket interface, an application programming interface (API), allows communications between hosts or between processes on one computer, using the concept of an Internet socket. It can work with many different I/O devices and drivers, although support for these depends on the operating-system implementation. This interface implementation is implicit for TCP/IP, and it is therefore one of the fundamental technologies underlying the Internet. It was first developed at the University of California, Berkeley for use on Unix systems. All modern operating systems now have some implementation of the Berkeley socket interface, as it became the standard interface for connecting to the Internet.