LAN -- Historic Overview

There are many types of networks out there, but the simplest and oldest is the LAN, or Local Area Network. The very first LAN, ARCNET, was developed by Datapoint Corporation in 1977, and it centered around the personal computer revolution. Now the history of the very first personal computer is shrouded in mystery, quite ambiguous, and honestly speaking, chronically biased. Anyway, for sake of convenience, let us consider it the Datapoint 2200 terminal, released by Computer Terminal Corporation, somewhere between 1970-71.

The original intention of Datapoint 2200 was to be a cost-effective programmable terminal emulator used to connect to a wide variety of mainframes. Eventually there arose a need for groups of 2200 to access shared components, such as floppy discs, as well as communicate with one another. Hence ARCnet, or Attached Resource Computer network, was introduced as a network protocol to help achieve that purpose.

Thus the very first LAN was defined as a group of nodes, spread over a geographically limited area, such as a building or a group of buildings, such that they are all capable of communicating with one another.

As the computer revolution grew in strength, and were becoming more numerous, different needs arose which gave rise to different types of networks and network protocols. Different LANs connected to one another over varying geographical ranges; campus, city(MAN), cities(WAN), and finally countries and continents(Internet).