A vendor supplies a program called a [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver ['device driver]], enabling networking hardware such as an [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_interface_controller ['ethernet adaptor]] to talk to the operating system. This in turn permits running programs to interact with networking using various flavors of interfaces such as [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets ['Berkeley sockets]] or [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock ['Windows Sockets 2]] ("Winsock").
A vendor supplies a program called a [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_driver ['device driver]], enabling networking hardware such as an [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_interface_controller ['ethernet adaptor]] to talk to the operating system. This in turn permits running programs to interact with networking using various flavors of interfaces such as [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets ['Berkeley sockets]] or [@https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winsock ['Windows Sockets 2]] ("Winsock").