Twenty years ago, networks were three-letter corporations that owned television. Today, they are the fabric of our information society. Following are the products that form the woof and warp of this new world.
SNA
IBM's mainframe networking standard, SNA (Systems Network Architecture), is arguably the major milestone in networking technology in the last 20 years. Virtually every Fortune 500 company's mainframe networks are based on it, as well as any other company that has an IBM mainframe. SNA, officially introduced in 1974 with products becoming available in subsequent years, gave users access to the enormous amounts of data stored on mainframes.
With SNA, IBM developed a layered approach to communications th
at was to be the basis for all the company's subsequent data communications work.
DECnet
Introduced in 1975, DECnet supported communication over a variety of networks, including Ethernet LANs and baseband and broadband networks. DEC adapted its architecture to interconnect workstations, terminals, PCs, Macs, PDPs, and VAXes.
Because of an architecture that put intelligence at each network node, and because of the connectivity to PDPs and VAXes, DECnet was widely embraced by research and academic communities.
TCP/IP
A funny thing happened while we were all waiting for OSI to take off. A stopgap networking solution developed years ago by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency, TCP/IP, blew OSI off the map.
Between 1978 and 1980, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed and deployed the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol on its Arpanet. Today, TCP/IP is used in most large corporate network
s to give users access to a wide variety of platforms on different networks. It is also the protocol of the Internet. Enough said.
Oracle SQL
If any one standard is responsible for the current boom of client/server networking, it's the database language SQL (Structured Query Language). Related to IBM's massive mainframe database DB2, SQL was brought to minicomputers in the late 1970s by the prescient Oracle corporation, which eventually ported SQL down to microcomputer LANs and stand-alone PCs (and even the Sharp Wizard--but nobody's perfect). Oracle's SQL became one of the first truly scalable applications development platforms. You could write and test your application on a workstation and then upscale it to your big iron when it was ready. Or better yet, you could downsize your mainframe apps to less expensive and more efficient systems, like PC networks.
SQL is such a popular standard that today, every major client/server application supports it; no competing architect
ure has come close.
Group 3 Fax standard
Remember being amazed when a fax machine could transmit a page in less than 30 seconds? That increase in speed was due to the CCITT's Group 3 recommendation for fax tranmissions. Issued in 1980, the Group 3 fax standard specified transmission rates of up to 9600 bps and included built-in compression, which made it possible to transmit a typical page in less than 30 seconds.
Ethernet
Today, when most office workers hear the name Xerox, they think of the photocopier machine, or they erroneously use the corporate name as a verb. We could just as well be using
Xerox
as a term for sending a file down the network wire.
In 1981, Xerox made history by introducing the original Ethernet LAN in the form of its Star Ethernet Series. The LAN was an office system that linked devices, such as workstations, servers, and printers, so that users could share and print documents.
The Star Ethernet Series wa
s the result of Ethernet research conducted by Xerox with DEC and Intel. It was the first introduction many corporate users got to LAN technology. Xerox was a name player in the office market, and thus its sales staff at least had a foot in the door of most corporations.
NetWare and Sharenet
In 1981, Novell introduced Sharenet, the first product in the line, which soon
became NetWare
. It took the simple idea of dedicating one node on a network as a central resource and developed it into the most highly used NOS today.
Novell was not the only company in that newly emerging NOS market. Other early players included IBM and 3Com. But NetWare, especially versions 2.x and 3.x, delivered the features that organizations needed most: solid file and print services.
Hayes Smartmodem
Before 1981, modems were just plain dumb. They had no memory, and they couldn't recognize commands. The early modems simply did as their name implies: th
ey modulated and demodulated signals.
With the advent of the Hayes Smartmodem in 1981, modems understood and could execute commands (the Hayes AT Commands) on their own.
The Smartmodem and the Hayes command set became the standard for modem communications and made Hayes the dominant player in the market for the next 10 years. Even today, most modem ads still state that the device is Hayes-compatible.
3Com Etherlink
In 1982, a small Silicon Valley company cofounded by Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, introduced the first Ethernet adapter card for a PC. The card, the Etherlink, became the best-selling networking product ever. 3Com, Metcalfe's company, also developed its own NOS (network operating system) with which to use its new creation and drive the sale of its core hardware product.
The Irma board
The Irma board
has to be the one product that symbolizes the acceptance of PCs by the corporate world. Befor
e Irma's introduction in 1982, corporate data, which resided on IBM mainframes, was accessed through 3270 terminals. From these 3270 terminals, users could view data and run applications that printed reports.
In the early 1980s, as PCs started to make their way into corporations, there was a cluttering on the desktop. A terminal and a PC took a lot of room-- especially those early IBM PCs with their large footprints.
Technical Analysis, soon to be acquired by Digital Communications Associates (DCA), developed a brilliant solution. Their Irma board, which plugged into a slot in an IBM PC, could give the PC user access to the mainframe data. The board included 3270 terminal emulation software and a coaxial-cable connection on the back to attach to the IBM network infrastructure.
Streettalk for Vines
Today, many corporations are looking for some way to easily keep track of resources and people on their networks. Ultimately, they'll probably use some form of a standards
-based directory service, perhaps the ISO's powerful X.500.
In the meantime, they are stuck with stopgap solutions--unless, of course, they are Banyan Vines users. Since 1984, Banyan has offered its users Streettalk, its LAN-based directory services, which are needed in enterprise networks. Streettalk was the first of the enterprise directory services, and some say it is still the best.
Token Ring
IBM developed token-ring technology in the early 1980s, and the first commercial products hit the streets in 1985. Token Ring was based on the concept of using a token, which was passed around the network, to give a device access to the network. When a device needed to transmit data, it would seize the token. This technique made a token-ring network more deterministic compared with Ethernet's contention-based method for accessing the network.
The deterministic nature of Token Ring quickly became a popular choice for IBM SNA shops and it was quickly adopted by virtually all
of IBM's large corporate customers as the way to link users throughout a corporation.
Cisco AGS multiprotocol router and Proteon Multiprotocol Gateway
These were the first routers to solve the problem of routing different protocols from and to a single network. Cisco's AGS supported TCP/IP and PUP. Proteon's Multiprotocol Gateway handled ARP, Chaosnet, TCP/IP, and PUP. We would like to award the laurel for first multiprotocol router to either Cisco or Proteon, but the companies are squabbling over who was first. Cisco, a source tells us, has produced the invoice for its first router sale and challenges Proteon to produce an earlier one.
ISDN
Still don't know? ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is the phone system of the future. Fully digital and quite affordable, it offers enough bandwidth (64 Kbps) for acceptable Internet access and almost enough for videoconferencing. It's also a flexible system, offering scalability up to 1.544 Mbps (not
coincidentally the same speed of a T1 line) for corporate sites. The downside of this noble mid-1980s standard is that it's really not standard at all--a lot of telephone markets implement the system differently, so bringing the next generation of communication into your home or business can be an exercise in frustration. Nonetheless, when analog modem technology runs out of steam (as it is beginning to do right now), ISDN will step in as the next great data communications standard.
Kerberos from MIT
In the mid-1980s, wizards at MIT developed Kerberos, a security system that controls access to network services. Their scheme requires that users be authenticated before they can get to any service on a network. Kerberos does this in an ingenious way. Users gain access to applications, data, printers, and so forth by using the equivalent of an electronic ticket, which is good for only one-time access and which, if the security administrator so desires, can expire within a fairly sho
rt time.
The system encloses the access ticket in an encrypted message using the user's own password. If the user is whom he or she claims to be, the user can decipher the message and the ticket will be available. The user's password is never passed over the network. Security is maintained.
OpenView
Enterprise network management was easier in the days of homogeneous networks. Companies whose networks were exclusively IBM, for example, would turn to IBM's NetView to manage all the devices on their SNA (Systems Network Architecture) networks.
That was fine until other vendors' products were introduced into a company's network--each with its own management system. Network managers had a deskful of monitors--one for every management system. They had to check the status of different devices on different monitors and assimilate all that information in their head. That was great for the aspirin companies, but for IS managers, it was impractical.
In 1988, Hewlett-Pac
kard
introduced OpenView
to overcome such problems. OpenView was the first multivendor network management system. It also offered open APIs. Network equipment vendors could use these programming interfaces to make their products capable of being managed by the system.
Access/One
Today, virtually all corporate networks are built around intelligent wiring hubs that offer management capabilities and can isolate troublesome cabling flaws. The first commercial network to offer these features was
Ungermann-Bass's Access/One hub.
Before this, most local networks were made up of daisy-chained components, and a single cable flaw would crash the whole system. Next time you find a flaw that affects only one user and not your entire network, give thanks to Ungermann-Bass.
The Sniffer
In 1989, Network General introduced the Sniffer, a single tool that helped network administrators develop and troubleshoot LANs. Today, the Sn
iffer is synonymous with network analyzers.
The Sniffer offered detailed protocol decoding capability and let LAN managers set traps to watch for certain conditions. It could also capture a trace of all the traffic passing over a LAN segment. These features were (and still are) useful when trying to understand performance problems on a network or when troubleshooting a problem.
Xircom Pocket Ethernet Adapter
Similar to the way the Irma board symbolized the acceptance of the PC in the corporate world, the
Xircom Pocket Ethernet Adapter
symbolized the networked arrival of the laptop computer. Xircom had the brilliant idea of using a standard, universally available entry point into the laptop. The company's slick little box plugged into the parallel port--probably the only truly standard PC part. That gave every laptop user a quick and easy way to connect to a LAN.
Mosaic
The most important reason for the explosive growt
h of the Internet over the past year is the mass distribution of
the Mosaic browser
for the World Wide Web. Developed by the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Mosaic gives nontechnical people an easy tool with which to find their way around the Internet. Those who could care less about HTTP or HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) can use a Mosaic browser and weave their way through webs of information on their own.
Marc Andreesen and his lesser-known colleagues at NCSA deserve some sort of prize for their efforts. Not only did they invent a brilliant vehicle for navigating the Internet--but they gave it away.
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Books. Lots and lots of books. Somewhere in there is the actual Ne
tware 3.11 software. But where? We'll never tell.
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We can think of exactly 3270 reasons that Attachmate's Irma board, which connects PCS to mainframes, was an incredible success.
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Mosaic is like the fairy godmother of the Internet, turning it from text rags to graphical riches.
Most Important Networking Products & Standards
