rstood this problem. With the advent of sleek interactive operating systems such as Digital's VAX/VMS and with the university world open-heartedly accepting the UNIX effort from Bell Labs, a new generation of com- 1. Atul Kapoor, SNA: Architecture, Protocols, and Implementation, J.Ranade IBM Series (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1992). Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY: DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING AND THE CONVERGENCE OF NETWORKS THE EVOLUTION OF NETWORK TECHNOLOGY 5 puter systems was developed. These systems were much more affordable than mainframes and were easy to run and manage with small teams of people. A plethora of these machines eventually appeared on academic and industrial campuses. People who used them were almost as enthusiastic about these machines as neophytes devoted to a cult. THE FIRST LOCAL AREA NETWORK (LAN) Around the early 1980s, local area networks (LANs) slowly moved out of the research community into the industrial world. Digital, Intel, and Xerox created the Ethernet based on research that was done at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Technology suddenly became extremely inter- esting. For example, a user could be running a program on one VAX and interact with another system on the network to develop software code while choosing his or her own printer that was going to be shared among several users on the LAN. These users would quickly become indignant of the older and rigid mainframe technologies. In many cases, they would even look down on traditional data-cen- ter IT staff and qualify them as "nonenlightened." Two parallel popular cultures were created. At the risk of stereotyping, it seemed that one culture was dressed in a coat and tie, and the other was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. IBM followed suit with the introduction of the token ring, which was based on resea