protocol is an Ancient Greek word, it referred to proto (first) and kollus (sticky). (approximately, my greek is not very good)
it meant "the instructions that are stuck to the first page of a written scroll to explain what you should do with this scroll", in other words "how & why to do stuff" then followed by a lot of detailed Ancient Greek things
we still use that a lot today in ICT, Wi-Fi Protocol for example is a family of
international standard ways of doing Wi-Fi, for Wi-Fi the protocol is usually called 802.11, and sub-types are 802.11a, b, n (all more or less ancient) today we use 802.11ac and soon we will use Wi-Fi Protocol (standard) 802.11ax (better security, better privacy, faster etc)
so an Ethernet Protocol is the standard by how data is transmitted over a particular system called Ethernet, named in honour of the victorian concept of outer space, & the skies above, being
Aether. The first "net" protocol standard was probably "Alohanet" designed to connect old internet (called ARPAnet back then) to Hawaii. that was an earlier form of Wi-Fi, however Ethernet is wire based, with grey or coloured cables plugging in between computers, plugged into Home Routers and especially Enterprise network switches.
one computer is a computer, two computers is two computers, but when you plug-in to these an ethernet cable using international standard Ethernet protocols (so that they both speak the same language to each other) then the computing power starts to quickly become immense, leading to today's internet.
Ethernet Protocol is from 1983 known as IEEE 802.3, and has been divided into different layers, like a multi-coloured sponge wedding cake. (in order to simplify the international standards agreements) with computers linked together into Local and wider Area Networks, LAN, WAN, MAN, and the data is built up and torn down for protection and security, in predictable ways, according to sub-protocols.
each layer of the cake has a name, and a technical description.
they do get quite complicated! more at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite. (apologies for wikipedia, but they have nice pictures on the RHS)
Network Topology,
Data Flow, and the de/e
ncapsulation of data as it passes higher up/down through the 'cake' layers.
Physical Link (cable, nowadays called "Cat 5e", or "Cat 6" with their own technical protocol,
Internet (using TCP/IP protocol),
Packet type (UDP for example, own technical protocol) and finally the
Data is passed to the application e.g. a browser to display this TSR message (the Browser also uses internet international standards)
so summing up, Ethernet Protocol is one of a whole, massive set of international communications standards without which a computer is just a single isolated computer, and it's amazing that it all works, from groups such as ETSI, ISO/IEC, IEEE, RFC, W3C, standards and protocols. And it started in Ancient Greece.