What is Protocol

To understand protocol first you need to understand what successful communication is? Below I am trying to describe the communication between a Boy and Girl

Boy	Girl
Hey	Hi
How you doing	Doing great, what about you
Will you join me for a movie	Yes sure, what time?
9 PM	Sounds great.

I  have marked above communication as successful communication because it has followed the rules of successful communication. If you read above conversation carefully then you will observe some rules there.

• Both have asked one question at a time. (one question at time.)
• A response was always given to each other. (A response is always expected.)

Like the above conversation between two human beings, computer also interact with each other and while communicating they also need some set of rules to communicate and these rules are called Protocols.

This rules can be

• One command at a time
• A response is always expected.

Today there are a lot of protocols

•  HTTP protocol
• FTP protocol
• TCP/IP protocol

I hope now you have a clear idea about what protocol really is.