A Brief History of Networking

Although We Take it for Granted Networking Has Come a Long Way!

Nowadays computer networks are so widespread in society it easy to forget how these networks emerged and why we needed them. The first computers were "mainframes", basically very large, expensive centralised computers. These mainframes contained the operating system and applications and could be accessed using "dumb terminals" ( a dumb terminal is simply a device that connects to a computer system using perhaps a keyboard and monitor but has little or no processing power of its own - therefore it is dumb!)

This early type of computer network actually had some advantages - hence this type of network is still used in some corporate environments, however the disadvantages included the fact that the mainframe manufacturers locked users into proprietary solutions for hardware, software and operating systems, at this point in time there were no "universal solutions" with cross compatible software or applications, software written by one manufacturer for a mainframe computer would not run on a different computer and even the hardware such as disc drives, memory and connectors were unique to each manufacturer! in addition, this type of early network was not "scalable" as all users were sharing the same processor in the mainframe this created a bottleneck in the network, the only workaround was to install processor upgrades or additional mainframes - both of these solutions were prohibitively expensive.