Do you know how the clouds hang poised,
Job 37:16 NIV
those wonders of him who has perfect knowledge?
Today, I think everyone knows what a “network” is. All you have to do is turn your phone on and you are part of your phone operator’s network. If you set up a WiFi code, then you can connect to a local WiFi network and away you go. The amazing thing about all this is that once you are connected, you can link up to nearly every other phone, tablet or computer on the planet. This is all very simple but mind numbingly complex to make happen and was not even possible back in the 1980s.
When I started with ICL in 1979, most companies or other large organisations had a mainframe computer in a specialist computer room somewhere in head office. Everyone who needed to use the computer would have a terminal which was connected to that mainframe computer. If the terminals were in another part of the country, they would all be connected to the mainframe using telephone lines. This was expensive and very very slow since trying to make a computer terminal to use an audio telephone line is highly inefficient.
Back at Bradford University, the lecturer who taught us about networks, Tom Wesley, claimed that when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he invented the wrong thing. The point was that it is much easier to transmit telephone conversations through a network designed for a computer, than it is to try and make a computer conversation work over a telephone line, designed to let people speak to each other.
When I started my career in ICL, things were changing. Computers were getting smaller and cheaper so that in a typical large organisation there would now be smaller minicomputers doted around, or even personal computers on peoples’ desks. The new requirement was therefore not just for things to be quicker and cheaper, but also for computers to be able to share information with each other and for terminals to access a number of different computers all at different locations. The old system of slow and expensive telephone lines simply wouldn’t cut it!
When I joined ICL there were a number of new things being created to solve this problem and I was fascinated by it all. This was to set the direction of my career for the next couple of decades because as far as I was concerned, Networking was where it was at.
One of the new things that ICL had created was something called OSLAN (which is an acronym standing for Open Systems Local Area Network). This was a single fat yellow cable which would run through the office. Computers in the office would tap into this cable at various points and through that single cable, be able to communicate with every other computer in the building.
This made cabling for computers in a typical office, much simpler and it was blisteringly fast compared with the older technologies. I will never forget the face of one IT manager, as his jaw dropped when I showed him a terminal connecting to the mainframe using OSLAN for the very first time.
I can’t remember how many presentations I did, showing managers how they could wire their buildings for IT with a single cable. I explained that it had had so much capacity it could cope with the communication needs of all of their computers and terminals. What we didn’t necessarily emphasise, was that if you cut this single thick yellow cable at any point, everything would stop working. However, even though it was primitive, that yellow cable is the ancester of the wire-less networking that we all use today.
We were also developing ways for computers to communicate over a wider distance, so-called Wide Area Networks. The thing we were selling was called X25 and this was trying to do something very similar to what the Internet does today (all be it, much more slowly).
When we were explaining all this to computer managers, we drew a cloud to represent the new network and lines between all their computers and the network. This representation is the origin of the term The Cloud, which you may have heard of, and is used today to mean all the stuff you can access using the Internet.
It was a fascinating and exciting time and we didn’t really know where it was leading. However, we did believe that what we were doing was leading to the future and this has been borne out by history. Today, everyone uses a network.
Richard Mann 