Presidential Ramblings

I really enjoyed the July general meeting. As a New Milford resident, I was curious about how Danbury was using technology to reduce costs and provide value to the tax payers. By the end of the program, I was ready to move to Danbury! Read the meeting review for more thoughts.

More Ramblings on Networking

Computer communications and networking have fascinated me since I first started using computers to earn a living back in the mid-70's. Back then time-sharing on mainframes was the only way to do "personal" computing and you needed some type of terminal to talk to the mainframe. The state of the art for road-warriors was the Texas Instruments Silent 700. The first model I used was about the size of a carry-on suitcase. A few years later and they shrank to the size of a portable typewriter. After removing the cover, you could see the keyboard and the printer. All output was on thermal paper fed from a roll behind the printer platen - you could measure your work in lineal feet! There were two foam rubber cups on the back where you shoved the telephone handset when you heard the modem on the other end start to squeal. If you did everything right, the printer would cough and print a login prompt. It ran at a blazing 110 bps - or 300 bps in high-speed mode. I was using a time sharing service in Stamford, CT, called National CSS. They provided their service on either an IBM 370-168 or an equivalent Amdahl (the "IBM compatible" of mainframes). It was a ton of fun.

The application I used was custom programmed to take sales estimates and inventory levels and crunch them into factory production schedules for such things as Jell-o and Birds-Eye vegetables. The computer actually did a fairly good job of this but the programs required so much "tending" that the whole thing was soon abandoned. In the meantime, however, I got to take a few minutes here and there to play such games as Wumpus, Adventure, and Lunar Lander - text-based, of course. These games were all eventually ported to personal computers. I know you could follow the same map years later on the IBM PC version of Adventure - it was the exact same game!

Modems didn't change much, other than speed, for more than twenty years. But networking sure did! We were a "true blue" shop where I worked, which meant we used all IBM equipment. Networking was something called SNA - Systems Network Architecture, a collection of hundreds of IBM products that often worked together. Since I was in the Applications Development department, networking remained a mystery. All we could ever learn was that, no, it was not possible to get faster response time on our IBM 3270 terminals. It was considered good, in our shop, if the terminal gave a response in less than five seconds - and the mainframe was just across the street in the "data center". Now we scream if it takes more than a second for a web page to start loading from across the country or around the world. Amazing!

In those days, all high-speed modems (faster than 300bps) were leased from the phone company. These IBM terminals were configured in groups of five and two or three groups would share a 9600bps dedicated modem connection to the data center. Microsoft was still located in Albuquerque, NM.

Learning about Networking

Fast forward to the early 90's - modems are faster, we're running Windows on our computers and I want to learn about networking. We started using local area networks (LANs) at work in the late 80's. Novell was king, but there were competing products from IBM and Microsoft. The people at the data center considered LANs to be a threat to their control over Information Technology, so actually installing a LAN took some political shuffling.

PC networks were way too expensive for home use but I still wanted to learn about networking. At some point I was able to obtain a couple of surplus Wang printer cables. Using a continuity lamp and a lot of patience, I made serial cables long enough to wrap around my home office and connect two computers. The addition of some programs that allowed file sharing over the serial connection completed my first "network". This made it easy to move files between machines, but was very slow and limited. Another year or so, and I found some outfit selling real Ethernet cards for just under $60 each - what a bargain!

Home Networking Arrives!

One machine in my office is a 286. There are a couple of documents that I still maintain in Framework IV and the 286 does just fine. It keeps you humble to use a 286 once in a while and this was one of the two machines in my original network. In those days, before the Internet and even before Windows 95, Microsoft networking meant using NetBEUI. NetBEUI is a simple but fast transport protocol for NetBIOS networking, designed by Microsoft for the original IBM PC Network in the mid-80's. From the end user perspective, it's as simple as networking could get. Simply plug in your network cards and if you have the interrupts and I/O addresses correct (no conflicts) in both computers and the coax is terminated correctly, and you edited the config.sys and autoexec.bat files correctly, it just worked! Yes,/it was that easy. Installing that network was more a lesson in PC hardware than networking. Windows for Workgroups (WfW) had just come out with networking (using NetBEUI) built in so I immediately upgraded the 486 to WfW but the 286 had to continue running Win 3.11 with a networking product called 10Net from Tiara Communications. You don't remember 10Net? Neither does anyone else, but it used NetBEUI and worked fairly well with WfW.

NetBEUI continued to run my home network until work pressures made it desirable to learn about TCP/IP - the protocol of the Internet. Remember, the whole justification for this network was to learn about networking and that is the point of all this. As broadband connections become more popular, more people have home networks. Unfortunately many people don't realize this and don't take any precautions to secure their "network".

Networking Learning Tools

My little home network grew from those first two machines about ten years ago to two or three servers (depending on mood and lunar phase) and three to five "workstations" (depending on what's hooked up and working at the moment). Making all this work has given me the opportunity to learn at least something about DNS, DHCP, WINS, TPC/IP, Telnet, ARP, SSH, Active Directory, many flavors of Windows and Linux, email, and a raft of other stuff I can't think of at the moment. And, of course, you can, too. Experimenting with your own network gives you experience that makes you more marketable. Open Source software makes it affordable to do really interesting things. So network your new computer to the old one. Learn what breaks your network and what fixes it. It will be fun and frustrating at the same time.

Well, I digressed more than a little from my intended topic of wireless networking and learning about routing. Routing is still a mystery to me and difficult to learn by experimentation without building a router. The consumer grade devices sold for home networks and small businesses are just too limited. I need to build a Linux or BSD UNIX machine from the ground up to be a router and firewall. If the City of Danbury can do it, well why not try!?

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