Networking and Internetworking - Guide to Cloud Computing for Business and Technology Managers - page 38

employees who already had a PC at home. The solution was a technical
fix: network the PCs to one another, in a local-area network (LAN). The
company that emerged with over half the business by 1989 was Novell,
located in the Salt Lake City area. Novell's Netware was a complex—and
expensive—operating system that overlaid DOS, seizing the machine and
directing control to a file server , typically a PC with generous mass storage
and I/O capability (the term server originated in Metcalfe and Boggs's 1976
paper on the Ethernet). By locating data and office automation software on
this server rather than on individual machines, some measure of central
control could be reestablished. Networking of PCs lagged behind the net-
working that UNIX workstations enjoyed from the start, but the personal
computer's lower cost and better office software drove this market.
Local networking took the personal out of personal computing,
at least in the office environment. Still, the networked office
computers of the 1990s gave their users a lot more autonomy
and independence than the timeshared mainframes accessed
through dumb terminals or glass Teletypes in the 1970s.
2.1.2 TCP/IP Protocol
ARPA became DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) in
1973, and it commenced work on a project connecting seven computers on
four islands using a radio-based network, as well as a project to establish a
satellite connection between sites in Norway and in the United Kingdom.
This led to a need for the interconnection of the ARPANET with other net-
works. The key challenge was to investigate ways of achieving convergence
between ARPANET, radio-based networks, and satellite networks, as these
all had different interfaces, packet sizes, and transmission rates. Therefore,
there was a need for a network-to-network connection protocol, and its devel-
opment would prove to be an important step toward developing the Internet.
An international network working group (INWG) was formed in 1973.
The concept of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) was developed at
DARPA by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, and they presented their ideas at an
INWG meeting at the University of Sussex in England in 1974. TCP allowed
cross network connections, and it began to replace the original NCP proto-
col used in ARPANET. However, it would take some time for the existing
and new networks to adopt the TCP protocol. TCP is a set of network stan-
dards that specify the details of how computers communicate, as well as
the standards for interconnecting networks and computers. It was designed
to be flexible and provides a transmission standard that deals with physi-
cal differences in host computers, routers, and networks. TCP is designed
to transfer data over networks that support different packet sizes and that