Networking Bible

Introduction

Networking is a vast subject that touches all aspects of computer technology. Indeed, some will argue that a computer that isn't networked isn't really a computer at all. It may be hyperbole to suggest that "The network IS the computer" as Sun did some years ago, but every important computer technology has incorporated some method for sending and receiving data to and from other computers. If you go as far back as you care to, the very first commercial computers were built to amortize their costs by allowing users to time share. Computer reservation systems such as SABRE linked to terminals worldwide, and when the personal computer became nearly as cheap as a dumb terminal, those PCs became the distributed nodes.

The rise of the personal computer in the early 1980s and 1990s helped to spawn networking technologies that made connectivity easier to achieve, cheaper, and most importantly more standardized. A whole host of different proprietary networking technologies have given way to the networking technologies of the Internet, TCP/IP networking. Although this book discusses some of the older technologies, the focus of this book is on the current state of computer networking and, therefore, much of the book explains internetworking standards based on TCP/IP. In ultrafast, high-bandwidth, and highly reliable networks, other technologies are used.

A number of these alternative technologies are presented in the context of the different capabilities that they provide. So while ...