The Emergence of Local Area Networks

The advent of IBM PCs in the early 1980s set a whole new standard in both business and personal computing. Along with PCs came a new operating system called DOS. DOS provided an easy programming environment for software vendors developing and publishing software. The significance of the DOS standard is that it stimulates growth of new products by providing software and hardware vendors with an open development platform to build both accessories and software products. Since this brought in an abundance of software, the use of personal computers increased. As more and more people began to use computers, it became obvious that a way of connecting them together would provide many useful benefits, such as printer and hard disk sharing, especially when budgets became a constraint. This gave birth to the Local Area Network (LAN) concept.