Designing user services on a PC LAN

Abstract

Personal Computer (PC) Local Area Networks (LANs) have gained a lot of press attention recently. PC use has proliferated in many businesses and schools, and LANs provide connectivity opportunities for these formerly isolated computers. Commercial LAN hardware has been on the market for several years, and has matured sufficiently to be reliable and cost effective. Recently, Microsoft developed the Network Basic Operating System (NETBIOS), and it promises to standardize the PC LAN market in much the same way that Microsoft's Disk Operating System (DOS) has done for PCs.The most efficacious use of these new LANs would be one that emphasize its unique characteristics. These characteristics can be summarized as: Employs PCs as the main nodes of the network.Provides peer-to-peer communication services.Allows sharing of PC peripherals, such as printers and hard disks.Uses DOS as its base.Runs software based upon earlier, stand-alone versions of DOS.The new DOS-based networks are ideally designed for general purpose user services. Specific retail or industrial applications are still best solved by multi-user systems with terminals. It is when the computing needs are diverse that a PC LAN, with its ability to run the thousands of software packages already available for DOS, is best suited.With the idea of providing user services on a PC LAN established, it is helpful to examine what current LAN software provides. NET software1 has seemingly developed in the same, infamous, way of DOS, and thus may have some deficiencies to correct before being successfully used.