 Black, Frame Relay Networks: Specifications and Implementations, Computer Communications Series (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1995). 6. Prakash Ambegaonkar, Intranet Resource Kit with CD-ROM (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Frontier Technologies, 1997). 7. Christian Huitema, Routing in the Internet (Upper-Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2000). 8. Uyless Black, Internet Architecture: An Introduction to IP Protocols (Upper-Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2000). 9. Uyless Black, IP Routing Protocols: RIP, OSPF, BGP, PNNI, and Cisco Routing Protocols (Upper-Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 2000). 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 10 NETWORK PROCESSORS The three most important points about this rapid and spectacular evolution are The fact that IP became the uncontested link technology between computer sites all over the world. New sets of protocols were developed that reside and function on top of the IP layer. These proto- cols provide several services to communicating devices, from reliable end-to-end transmission to the reservation of network resources and the quantification of quality of service (QoS). These pro- tocols include some very well-known tools, such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) family of languages, upon which the World Wide Web (WWW) has been based. The fact that numerous alternative routes could be calculated on-the-fly between points A and B on this globally deployed network thanks to advancements in routing technology. We saw earlier how IP evolved to become the de facto communication link technology at layer 2. Now let us look at other WWW technologies that at first sight might appear unrelated to this evolu- tion of computer com