Tale of nets - 01 (Where it all began )

Where it all began…

However the first computer was built and they were happy about it. Here they means the computer techie guys coz at that time normal people couldn't afford to use computers like now. Of course there were not computers like we have now. They were the large computer, large like fitting in a room and the were not called computers at least. They were called mainframes or supercomputers. Although their sizes were like jumbos they were very slow and couldn't do super-duper tasks like controlling a rocket or something like that. How ever they can't be blamed. At least they have made a very large equipment that does something, right. :)

One large mainframe in those days

In order to work with these Mainframes they needed nodes or some may call them as terminals. So they were very not mobile. The equipment’s could not have been transported another place. So here comes the word. They were centralized not distributed.

Mean while , the DOD(Dept of defence) in America were building and experimenting on their first distributed system ARPANET. I cant really recall what the letters that stand for but you are free to google it :p .It was a military project and later it was opened for the privileged research groups at Big universities in the states.

So how ever lots of System Network Architectures were proposed for this system. Some big companies like IBM proposed some architectures named like SNA,DNA,DCA,BNA. Seriously ,these names are not that important but if you are craving for more , just google them. Most of these architectures included following functionalities.

• ·        File transfer from node to node
• ·        Remote printing
• ·        Terminal transfer(remote logging)
• ·        Remote file access

Lots of architecture and there were no one accepted standard. That later became a huge problem. So networking and system companies had their own infrastructure and standards. This was kinda ok because most of the time for an organizations networking and systems requirements they bought everything from a one company. But the problem came when they needed to do an upgrade or switch between the companies or infrastructure. It was like pain in everywhere for the tech guys. So there became a need for a everyone accepted standard.

So then we had the OSI standards or commonly known as OSI rreference model. This was 7 layered model for systems for ttransmitting data over a network. However this was not a perfect model. This had some issues. Issues like existing companies not migrating to this standard. How ever with the invention of UNIX this time of the decade these problems slowly came to an end and OSI model slowly transformed into the TCP/IP model that we use today.

I should say this. OSI is not TCP/IP. But in a way they are not that different also. Its like the same little girl but much older and much prettier now. We will discuss the similarities and differences of them later.How eer what happened there was ARPANET started with only 4 nodes and then it became a network with 50 nodes and so and It became the word wide web or the internet that we use today. So just because ARPANET adapted to TCP/IP and it became very popular TCP/IP is the standard now and that it. 

More on later ...