Now that you have an idea of what networking is all about,
where did it all come from? Over the years, the big technology companies and the government have made the majority of leaps and strides in the networking industry. The military, with its unlimited budget,
has had plenty of money to pump into research and development of networking technologies.
Standards have always been a big part of the industry. There has to be
standards like 'hi' and 'hello' in place otherwise things get confusing. Standards have to be in place for networks to use as well. The biggest influence (although not really a standard) is the Open Systems
Interconnection reference model. The OSI model is the framework for many different technologies; this will be discussed later. There are committees out there that sit around and come up with standards, the
largest one being the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers). The next time you are in a computer store, go to the cable isle and look at the printer cables. Most of them are IEEE rated and
standardized.The big changes in networking have occurred very recently (big surprise). The successful ventures have been the ones that keep their source code and support open. Novell was the first company
to come out with software that wasn't hardware restricted. Prior to this, giants like IBM designed all of their products to run on IBM based systems. Once you ran IBM, you stayed with IBM.
UNIX's success is similar to Novell's. UNIX
was developed for colleges and universities with government funding. UNIX was one of the first to support a very popular open protocol, TCP/IP. The military was already using this protocol and so colleges and universities could then talk to the government.
Hardware and software separated for PC's in 1985. This meant that manufactures were making generic parts for use in any 'PC compatible' system. Your average home user was then building their own systems,
called clones. These clones flooded onto the streets and prices fell. In 1989, clone PC's were able to run a token ring on a Novell operating system (these terms will be explained later). This created
an explosion that eventually led to the popularization of the Internet in 1996. Don't be concerned if you are overwhelmed. This is just a brief history.
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