Chapter 1. A Short Bio of NetBIOS

Groan + Grump = GroanUmp

Me, speculating on the etymology of the term "Grown-up" for my children

It all started back in the frontier days of the PC when Microsoft was a lot smaller, IBM seemed a whole lot bigger, and Apple owned personal computer territory as far as the eye could see. Back then, you didn't need no dang standards. If you wanted to sell LANs, you just went out and branded yourself a protocol. Apple had AppleTalk, Digital had DECnet, and, for their longhorn mainframes, IBM had S ystems N etwork A rchitecture (SNA). SNA was a mighty big horse for little PCs, so IBM hired on a company called Sytec and together they rustled up a product they called "PC Network." Not an inspiring name , but it was a simpler time.

PC Network was a Local Area Network (LAN) system designed to support about 80 nodes at best, with no provisions for routing. NetBIOS ( Net work B asic I nput O utput S ystem) was the software interface to the PC Network hardware. It offered a set of commands that could control the hardware, establish and delete sessions, transfer data, etc.