Introduction to Network Tutorial, 4th Edition

The previous edition of this book included the first 88 of these two-magazine-page overviews of technical networking topics, running monthly from August 1988 until December 1995. I remember thinking at the time I compiled them just how fresh many of them had managed to remain after as much as seven years .

After five more years, years that encompassed a great many major changes in the networking field, many of the early tutorials no longer seem fresh at all. In fact, reading some of them again was like opening a time capsule . A few (Twisted Pair FDDI) I've jettisoned altogether, although they're still on the Web site for serious nostalgia junkies. A few (Which Fast LAN?) I've left because they're historically interesting, even if they're barely relevant to a network manager nowadays. And a few others I've slapped a fresh coat of paint over, taking out the most obvious bad market predictions , updating references to their 21st century equivalents, and correcting mistakes I failed to catch the last time around.

Incidentally, the 4th Edition of the Network Tutorial follows the 3rd Edition of the LAN Tutorial because we changed the name of the magazine in 1997. For better or worse , no one would admit to actually having a LAN in the late 1990sif you didn't have an Intranet you might as well throw in the towel. Now "Intranet" is beginning to have a moldy ring to it, though I must admit I never warmed up to the term and have tried gamely but unsuccessfully to keep the magazine's editors and writers from using it. In any event, the magazine, which was never reluctant, dating all the way back to 1986, to write about wide area network technology and other topics not strictly bounded by the local area, had no strong attachment to the name "LAN," and was happy to take the title "Network Magazine," which somehow no one had locked up in the whole speckled history of computer networks.

The third edition of the LAN tutorial included each installment of an ongoing series of articles that originally appeared in LAN Magazine through December 1995. These tutorials were written by Rebecca J. Campbell, Lee Chae, Dave Fogle, Alan Frank, Melanie McMullen, Steve Steinke, Aaron Brenner, Jim Carr, Ken Mackin, Thomas Peltier, Patricia Schnaidt, and Bonny Hinners. Melanie McMullen and Steve Steinke expanded and upgraded the glossary to provide an even more comprehensive quick reference for unfamiliar terms.

The third edition was edited by Steve Steinke, building on the editorial framework created by Patricia Schnaidt from the first and second editions.

The tutorials new to the 4th edition ran between January 1996 and March 2000. The authors who wrote tutorials in that time span were Lee Chae, Alan Frank, David Greenfield, Anita Karv, Steve Steinke, and Alan Zeichick.

I have one request to make of the reader: Please grant the authors a fair degree of slack with respect to the URLs cited here. Internet links get changed all the time, for reasons trivial and profound. We tend to print URLs with as much specificity as possible in order to unambiguously identify sources. However, these detailed locators are consequently fragile things. Aside from these considerations, URLs printed in a book will lack a certain degree of freshness from the mere facts of printing technology delays and shelf lives. A bit of ingenuity with a general search engine, or with the search features at one of the domains we cite, will go a long ways toward tracking down documents that are no longer in the place they were when we found them. The good news is that as far as I can tell, hardly anything that has been posted to the Web ever goes away completely.

Steve Steinke
January 2000