Outlook examines the LAN’s exciting life and times…

Three simple words, ‘Go do it’, signaled the birth of the first LAN. Uttered by Jonathan Schmidt, Vice President of Advanced Product Design at Datapoint, in the summer of 1976, they gave software engineer Gordon Peterson the green light to put his proposal for a revolutionary high-speed, multi-user, packet switched networking solution into action. Peterson couldn’t wait to start: ‘I was already very excited by what it would represent, both for Datapoint and the industry’.

By March 1977, the Attached Resource Computer (ARC) System was up and running in-house and had earned an enthusiastic user base. People who had asked, ‘Why do we need that?’ says Peterson, started saying ‘you’ll take it back over my dead body!’ ‘Once they experienced the connectivity and convenience, folks were quickly won over.’

In fact, Datapoint’s motivation initially had more to do with cost-savings than user convenience, says Peterson. It offered a way to link expensive computers and disk drives to a number of much less costly workstations. But it also allowed people to share a common database, so that a transaction entered by one person would be instantaneously available to other users, while increasing the amount of processing power that could be clustered around that data. ‘Suddenly, linking previously independent departmental systems became easy and natural. It took us a while to realise that this was just as important as the reduction of cost,’ says Peterson today.

In September 1977, ARCnet was installed at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, one of Datapoint’s most demanding customers. In an environment in which huge organisations were used to continually replacing vastly expensive hardware when it reached its capacity limit, the new system ‘pretty much eliminated the upwards limits of growth’, says Peterson.

Then, on 1 December 1977, the ARC System went public in a big way, its launch taking up most of the front page of Computerworld. Although plenty of people were tinkering around the edges or researching similar networks, no-one else could offer a fully market-ready solution: ‘The ARC System was not just a research project in a lab, but could be ordered, ready for applications programs to use it immediately, for essentially immediate delivery,’ explains Peterson.

Peterson remembers telling colleagues at the launch: ‘Today we are pushing a big rock over a very big cliff. From this day forward the days of the mainframe as the primary workhorse for business data processing are numbered.’ They said: “Gordon, you are crazy, big businesses are never going to give up their mainframes and run their processing on networks of little computers”. My response was: “You just watch”.’

The system, says Peterson, set standards for remote resources that many of the most popular LAN systems employ to this day. It wouldn’t be until Novell came out with a networking solution to link the new IBM PCs in 1982 that another complete, ready-to-use solution would appear.

Next steps

As he acknowledged, Peterson and his colleagues at Datapoint were certainly not alone in attempting to link computers, before or after the ARC System went live. For example, in Hawaii, Norm Abramson had created the radio-linked ALOHAnet to connect computers spread throughout the islands in 1970 – a rudimentary wireless LAN. And it was Robert Metcalfe’s refinement of that system at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) that emerged as the first Ethernet protocol in 1979, providing another way to transport data from a PC to a server, or other device. His continued development of this protocol would lead to its adoption as an open industry standard in the 1980s, giving it a lead role in PC connectivity that persists today. Then, with the adoption of TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol) as a standard for connection to the burgeoning internet around the same time, the groundwork was laid for network-enabled computers to extend their reach across the world.

These efforts, combined with a rapid procession of advances in hardware and software from established companies like IBM, Xerox and Hewlett Packard, and new start-ups (now giants) Sun, Novell, Cisco and Microsoft, have seen the fledgling LAN benefit from new tools and applications, the cost of the new personal computers and peripherals dramatically decrease and computing power grow to exceed the wildest dreams of those that guided the technology’s first, tentative, steps.

Today, the LAN is the dominant part of the user’s environment, says Ian Barlow, Senior Product Manager at ntl:Telewest Business, with the next stage of its evolution bringing converged services into the fold: ‘About four years ago, there was a step change, when the growth of IP extended to let telephony, videoconference – services that had previously been on separate networks – come onto the LAN’. This has allowed the LAN to no longer simply be something the connects one desktop to another, but to emerge as the vehicle for what has come to be called ‘mobility’. ‘A LAN is no longer just a LAN,’ Barlow says. ‘People can work across the internet or across dedicated lines, and are actually running applications in the LAN.’  He cites improvements in speed – even a £400 laptop now comes with a gigabit Ethernet port – and infrastructure as the game-changing elements here, getting over the crucial factors of delay and loss that plagued earlier voice and video streaming attempts.  

LAN let loose

And LAN continues to stretch its legs, now into the wireless space, at the same time stretching the concept of ‘local’ to nearly breaking point. Wireless standards came in 1999, so wireless LAN (WLAN) is not new. What is new is suitably robust and fast wireless connectivity fit for enterprise use, and its ability to provide cost savings on all-wired LANs – always a draw for profit-conscious shareholders and public sector organisations accountable to the public purse.

‘The cat’s out of the bag,’ says Chris Silva of Forrester, who reports that currently 50% of North American and European enterprises have wi-fi technology in-house*. ‘Users have seen the benefits of working unwired… The bandwidth is there and security has matured enough that it should no longer be the major concern.’ Silva predicts that voice over WLAN is poised to move into the enterprise, as the draft 802.11n standard makes gigabit Ethernet a reality and gives the necessary power boost to wireless. He cites new tools like location-based services, popular in the healthcare, manufacturing and logistics industries, and RFID tags that allow people and devices to be tracked, as features that are getting WLAN noticed.

As with the ARC System, there has also been the realisation that cost-savings and user benefits can go hand in hand. Silva explains: ‘Until this point, wireless networks have been seen as overlays to an existing wireless LAN and, frankly, as a redundant convenience option. But when you start doing the math around replacing very expensive wired drops, especially in a new-build situation, wireless networking gets a boost; it’s no longer talking about productivity and user satisfaction, it’s talking about removing building costs as you deploy a new office.’

There’s even talk of the wired LAN disappearing completely, with US company Burton Group advising customers to prepare for WLAN to wipe out Ethernet in the next two years. So is the next stage of LAN freedom from wires? Ian Barlow is skeptical: ‘Wireless is fabulous, because it gives you mobility and flexibility. But if you’ve got a lot of people using high-powered applications wanting a gigabit each, the wireless infrastructure just wouldn’t hack it.’ Forrester’s Silva agrees that industries that rely on a high degree of mobility may move to wireless as their primary network, but, he says,‘Even in the touted ‘wireless offices’, you’ll continue to see wired connections for shared resources like printers, application servers and conference rooms.’

So what is next for LAN? ‘What we do see is a move from spotty connectivity to relatively pervasive wireless, to a third phase – what we call ubiquitous mobility,’ says Silva, ‘and that is about five years away, when things like wi-max have taken hold and users can roam from an office that is unwired, to a wi-max network with relative parity.’

Already, the increasing strength of wireless is assisting with the emergence of Unified Communications. This IP-enabled convergence of traditionally computer-based activities (ie email, calendars, instant messaging) with those that had resided on the wired and mobile telephony networks (phone calls, voice mail and conferencing), is a model that major innovators including Cisco and Microsoft are actively pursueing. The vision is of a computing environment in which users move seamlessly from one type of communication to another, choose which device to use at which time and how best to ensure that customers and colleagues can reach them in the easiest way.

While Silva’s predictions on wi-max remain to be proven, this vision of seamless, borderless communications is rapidly taking hold. The message for LAN? Don’t plan on retirement any time soon.

*Key Wireless Trends That Will Shape Enterprise Mobility In  2008, Forrester, February 2008