The Emergence of Internetworking, 1985–1988

Abstract

budgets for information technology (IT), transforming the role of IT from a small operation to a major department with functions across the entire enterprise. Corporations needed to take two steps to leverage the full capability of LANs: first, connect all their computers to LANs, and second, interconnect their LANs into enterprise-wide networks. At the start of 1987, these enterprise networks remained more of a promise than a required capital investment. But it didn’t take long for the new start-ups of internetworking—SynOptics, Retix, Vitalink, Cisco, and Wellfleet—to ship products, and for dozens of other companies to enter the market. By the end of 1988, the third wave of computer communications— internetworking—was under way. As we have seen many times in this history of computer communications, pub­ lic demonstrations helped to consolidate and publicize existing capabilities while helping to identify the work that remained to be done. Three demonstrations featured the networking and internetworking capabilities of OSI: the National Computer Conference in 1984, the Autofact trade show in 1985, and the Enter­ prise Networking Event (ENE) in 1988. The alternative to the OSI protocols were those that had been birthed and shepherded by DARPA: TCP/IP. The US federal government had made clear their preference for networks using OSI protocols, not TCP/IP. Nevertheless, a growing band of diehards and vendors eager to market new products continued to offer solutions that leveraged the popularity of TCP/IP. They too staged a series of annual demonstrations culminating in the Interop trade show of 1988. In these demonstrations, TCP/IP proved robust and viable, even if The Emergence of Internetworking, 1985–1988