Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals

Posted by tripwire45 on Mar 9, 2008 4:51 PM EDT
The Linux Tutorial; By James Pyles
Mail this story
Print this story

On an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge tries to get the Enterprise out of an energy-draining booby trap by creating a simulation of the original Galaxy class starship propulsion design from the Utopia Planitia shipyard on Mars on the holodeck. Ultimately, he is successful with the help of a holodeck simulation of one of the original warp engine designers and thus, the ship is saved. Oddly enough, this is the kind of approach author John Day has taken to describe network architecture fundamentals to the audience of this book.

Day takes us back to the beginning; back to the early days of ARPANET in the 1970s; back to the Internet's own "Utopia Planitia" prototype. He should be familiar with the terrain. He's been there since that beginning back in 1970, researching and developing computer networks. As such, this book seems as much about history and philosophy as about network architectures. In fact, the Beginning at the Beginning section of the Introduction chapter does mention a "young philosopher" in 1921, so don't expect to be able to predict the course of this book by its title.



While Day takes the time to define such terms as architecture, model, and protocol, these aren't the simple "answers-to-exam-questions" definitions but rather, definitions from the point of view of the people who were responsible for defining the building blocks of network computing, long before "Internet" became a household word. Strolling through the beginning pages of Day's text is like walking the path with the architects of ARPANET, watching them decide how to lay the foundations of computer networking when the concept was at the same stage of development as was manned space flight when John Glenn first orbited Earth in Friendship 7.

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Reviews; Groups: HP, IBM, Intel

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.