t, which eventually became known as Fast Ethernet. 15. William Stallings, SNMP, SNMPv2, SNMPv3, and RMON 1 and 2 (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1999). 16. avid Perkins and Evan McGinnis, Understanding SNMP MIBs (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1996). 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 13 Driving the cost down of Ethernet LANs was a process that had to go through at least a couple of evolutionary stages, from the original coax cable to the twisted pair (Cheapernet) to ultimately unshielded twisted pair (UTP). At the heart of the 10Base-T standard and in conjunction with the advent of switched LAN technology, UTP caused the explosive proliferation of LANs during the 1990s. The various segments of an Ethernet LAN were connected in a hub-and-spoke architecture that enabled easy deployment and scalability. The wide availability of hubs (more accurately called LAN repeaters) turned out to be an easy way for network management to allocate bandwidth and ensure easier physical connectivity, overall site management, and ultimately QoS to users. Small startups offering hubs such as 3Com, Cabletron, and Wellfleet/Bay Networks, soon became multibillion-dol- lar companies. The presence of repeaters on local networks, working in combination with routers when these networks were getting connected with large-scale metropolitan area networks (MANs) or wide area networks (WANs), made network management even more of an urgent and critical issue. This fact exacerbated the industry's efforts toward advancing and developing network management technology even further. In campus networks, where periphery LANs often served many users with Fast Ethernet capabil- ities, the backbone that was feeding these p