ved. 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 8 NETWORK PROCESSORS IBM not only embraced UNIX, but it also created its own powerful version of it, which was dubbed Advanced Interactive Executive (AIX). That work was further compounded by the establishment of and support for the Open Software Foundation (OSF), an industry consortium that IBM helped set up together with other major vendors. Along with UNIX, programming legitimacy was now given to the C language, which was embedded inside the original UNIX offering. This became another deciding factor for the promotion and ultimate adoption of C++ which as we saw, strongly influenced the appearance of Java. With its sockets and inherent support of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), UNIX offered a very straightforward means to communicate with other computer systems, log in remotely, and activate file transfers. It was only natural to expect that because these UNIX machines could be connected on LANs and bridged networks, a different global connectivity paradigm was needed. PACKET-SWITCHED VERSUS CIRCUIT-SWITCHED NETWORKS In the 1970s, data communication was no longer just an item of curiosity and started becoming real- ity on a large scale. Modems were developed that enabled the transmission of digital information over analog telephone lines. For the first time, digital data could be superimposed onto an analog carrier wave that was transmitted on ordinary lines. At the time, it sounded like rocket science to the average person, even though we smile when we hear about it now. Organizations could transmit information from one site to another. Companies started realizing that they would need a certain level of guaran- teed bandwidth per month for their data transfer operations between systems. The economics of buy- ing or leasing a line (or a set of lines) became a typical business case study. Carriers would block specific lines physically for custom