Local area networks and the practical aspects of interworking

The potential for cost-effective distribution and coordinated sharing of information processing systems is substantially enhanced by the recent emergence of comparatively cheap, very reliable, high speed local area networks (LANs). The lack of common interface specifications is however a major impediment to progress. The benefits to be gained by ensuring that the user accessible interface to a local area network provides identical functionality to that offered over a long haul network argue for a subset of features common to both types. This need for commonality argues against exploitation of some of the more novel features intrinsic to certain styles of technologically advanced systems. By this means, the enormous investment in existing (wide area) networked applications can be applied within a local context and, perhaps even more importantly, applications mounted in a LAN environment will also be accessible from, and be able to communicate with, other more remote systems.