The LAN - Past, present and future
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
