Development and direction of network services

The development of network services as applied to high-performance workstation technology is reviewed. The first workstations were often linked in local area networks (LAN) that were built without taking into consideration any of the other existing networks in an organization. The second stage of network services involved a backbone network, in which disparate groups were connected by a LAN. This stage was followed by the development of a cooperative operating system, then a network operating system, and finally an open network system. Potential network services which may lead to a true distributed computing environment are also briefly considered.