During the 1980s Local Area Networks (LANs) and the applications that emerged to run over them revolutionized business operations fundamentally. One could argue that LANs prepared businesses for the further revolution to come in the 1990s, in the form of e-business over the Internet. The ability to communicate via e-mail, the use of shared office applications, and the ability to transfer image-based documentation in seconds are now taken for granted. In the early 1980s the first home computers were only just emerging, and the personal computer was slow and relatively expensive and relied on command-line input and menu-driven, character-based applications. The first LANs were relatively slow and unreliable and were more of an academic curiosity than a mission-critical resource. Today the LAN is now as valuable a resource as the phone system, and many modern businesses could not operate effectively without both; in fact, the network is becoming the phone system.

During the early 1980s, there were a variety of access technologies vying for dominance, including Ethernet, Token Ring, Token Bus, ArcNet, and Apple's LocalTalk. By the mid 1980s there were still no clear winners, and a religious debate was being waged between the Token Ring and Ethernet camps. A typical customer visit would not be complete without the customary discussion about their respective merits. What subsequently emerged was a vote for simplicity and cost-effectiveness, and it is generally accepted that Ethernet won. Token passing offered a very reasonable and apparently compelling argument in the form of deterministic performance, which...