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It wasn’t long after the development of electronic computers before people needed to get information from one computer to another. I have not been able to find out when or how the first two computers were wired together in such a way that data could be sent directly from one to another. However, it is easy to speculate that the first computer network, if you can call it that, consisted of a central computer connected to two or more teleprinters. The Internet started out as a single terminal at UCLA that could connect to a single computer at Stanford University.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s the PC proliferated in the office and people needed to move data between computers and share printers. Data was moved by floppy disk. Today this is jokingly called sneakernet. Printers were shared by connecting several computers to one printer through a switchbox.
What people needed was for a user at one computer to be able to access the hard disk and printer at another computer as easily as if they were part if his or her own computer. During the 1970s Xerox developed such a system and expanded into modern networking. Xerox called their network Ethernet and it is still by far the dominant system.
A home network may be as simple as two computers connected to the Internet via a broadband router. A larger home network could have a computer for each member of the family with a home theater computer and possibly a file server. They are essentially the same except for the number of computers. The needs of a small business are about the same except more computers. A small business is more likely to have a central logon server to control access to the whole network plus file servers, printer servers, networked printers, web servers and the like. However, the only difference is size. Compared to a home network a small business network just has bigger switches (where all the computers connect together) so there can be more computers. A large organization may have multiple small networks connected through routers. This is called an enterprise network. Elements of an enterprise network are not completely beyond the scope of this book but we will be concentrating on small networks here.
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