Office Network Topologies

History of network topologies in office environments

The networking of the office environment provides a useful and informative guide as to how network environments could develop in the wider community. The first ‘networks’ that appeared in offices were totally based on a central control and connection topology and philosophy. Companies would have large mainframe computing resources. They would use a network to allow remote access to these central computing resources. Then the personal computer started to appear. These were initially used for stand-alone tasks, such as word processing. The next stage was then to connect these stand-alone PCs direct to the central mainframes, in much the same way the terminals before them where connected.

This model was soon to be replaced by LANs (local area networks). One of the first objectives of LANs in offices was to share local resources, the most common being printers. However, it soon became apparent that the LANs could be used for much more than the sharing of printer resources. It became obvious that there was more flexibility and functionality to be gained by linking a department together in a LAN, which in turn would be linked to other departmental LANs and finally to the central mainframe resources, making the corporate WAN (wide area network).

If you label the internet as ‘central computing resource’, then it is clear that for most individuals and small companies we are still at the stage of linking all the individual PCs straight into the ‘centre’. At the moment the next stage of evolution is missing. That is, the linking of PCs together, based on physical proximity, into LANs that then link together along with other keys elements of the community (local government, libraries, schools, etc.) to make Community area networks (CAN).

back to CommunityAreaNetwork