History of Networking

History of Networking

The History of Networking since the early times of computers.

Computer Networking history

Because networking is such a broad and complex field, no single event represents its point of origin. We can think of the 1960s as the early period, however, because that’s when the digital computer began to significantly affect the lives of ordinary individuals and the operations of businesses and governments.

For example, during that decade the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) began to use mainframe computers to process tax returns. In this section, we’ll survey the development of networking and related communication technologies and standards from the 1960s through the 1990s.

Network History 1960
Networking History in 1960

The quality and reliability of the PSTN increased significantly in 1962 with the introduction of pulse code modulation (PCM), which converted analog voice signals into digital sequences of bits. Read more

In the 1980s, the growth of client/server LAN architectures continued while that of mainframe computing environments declined. The advent of the IBM PC in 1981 and the standardization and cloning of this system led to an explosion of PC-based LANs. Read more

While the 1960s were the decade of the mainframe, the 1970s gave rise to Ethernet, which today is by far the most popular LAN technology. Ethernet was born in 1973 in Xerox’s research lab. Read more

The 1990s were a busy decade in every aspect of networking, so we will only touch on the highlights here. Ethernet continued to dominate LAN technologies and largely eclipsed competing technologies such as Token Ring and FDDI. Read more

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