The Desktop Computer as a Network Participant

Abstract

A desktop personal computer can be greatly extended in usefulness by attaching it to a local area network and implementing a full set of network protocols, just as one might provide for a mainframe computer. Such protocols are a set of tools that allow the desktop computer not just to access data elsewhere, but to participate in the computing milieu much more intensely. There are two challenges to this proposal. First, a personal computer may often be disconnected from the network, so it cannot track the network state and it must be able to discover and resynchronize with that state very quickly. Second, full protocol implementations have often been large and slow, two attributes that could be fatal in a small computer. This paper reports a network implementation for the IBM Personal Computer that uses several performance-oriented design techniques with wide applicability: an upcall/downcall organization that simplifies structure; implementation layers that do not always coincide with protocol specification layers; copy minimization; and tailoring of protocol implementations with knowledge of the application that will use them. The size and scale of the resulting package of programs, now in use in our laboratory for two years, is quite reasonable for a desktop computer and the techniques developed are applicable to a wider range of network protocol designs.