appeared in the market that would enable users to create two-dimensional and three-dimensional mechanical designs for car frames, ship hulls, airplane fuselages and wings, and even offshore drilling platforms. These tools were extremely computation oriented, especially when they combined mathe- matical techniques such as finite-element simulation modules. Special computing platforms were needed. In addition to being too expensive for the average research and development lab, traditional IBM mainframes were not equipped with number-crunching capabilities. The IBM mainframe S/360 and 2. http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/ 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 6 NETWORK PROCESSORS S/370 architectures made their reputation as fast data-center machines due to the special IBM chan- nel processor architecture, which could efficiently handle several input/output (I/O) requests from the CPU to and from the hard disks. However, when an executed program was lean on I/O and heavy on computations, the IBM CPUs were weak. This gave rise to several new companies such as Computer Vision, Intergraph, and Applicon, which pioneered the field of CAD/CAM workstations and eventually Electronic Design Automation (EDA) for the electronics industry. One of the reasons DEC was extremely successful at the time was because its VAX architecture was able to handle computationally heavy software better than the traditional IBM machines. As a result, DEC could capitalize on users with specific computing needs as opposed to the traditional IBM approach of "one architecture fits all." By the time IBM realized the pitfalls of their approach, DEC was an established global powerhouse. IBM responded by using channel-attached array processors, which were arranged by original equ