et were quite different from SNAs, but the two protocol suites were widely viewed as archri- vals. DECnet has continued to be used in some applications, long after its crea- tor was absorbed into Compaq Computer, itself later absorbed into Hewlett-Packard Inc. The 1970s and early 1980s were thus a period of great diversity and prog- ress in computer networking. That diversity would ironically enough turn into a monoculture by the 1990s, driven by the public Internet. The Great Telecom Meltdown OSI, the Big Committee That Couldn't Although DECnet and SNA were widely used, they had plenty of competition from other vendor-proprietary network technologies. One should perhaps make note of the pioneering work of Datapoint Corp., a Texas-based minicomputer company whose late-1970s desktop computers had the first commercially prac- tical local area network, ARCnet, which included both its own coax-based physical media and the higher layers to enable data sharing. Xerox Corp. invented Ethernet, which evolved into the dominant family of LAN technolo- gies even as Xerox itself drew little benefit from it. (DECnet Phase IV was itself designed in large part around Ethernet, of which Digital was a strong sup- porter.) Xerox developed its own protocol suite, XNS, which saw some usage in the early 1980s. Although largely forgotten, XNS was adapted by Novell Corp. into its own IPX/SPX protocol suite, which usually ran over Ethernet. Novell became the dominant vendor of LAN servers in the 1980s; it gradually migrated its servers to use TCP/IP only after the Internet was ubiquitous. Other also-ran protocols included Burroughs Corp's BNA and a host of LAN-based suites that took on Ethernet and Netware in the 1980s. As computer companies developed their own technologies, many realized that their customers were, for the most part, not single-vendor shops. Although early computer networks were almost entirely single-owner affairs (the ARPAnet being Uncle Sam's private property, albeit with a few invited guests), vendors needed to make 