Friday, September 26, 2008

Week 6 Readings - Wikipedia LAN article

I thought this was one of the less impressive Wikipedia articles that we have read. LAN is a complicated topic, and I felt that the author(s) didn't provide a lot of connnection between the topics after the History section. I know a bit about LAN's so I was able to understand it but I don't think a novice would have grasped why LAN's are different than WAN's and why we need them. Many homes today actually have small LAN's and that wasn't covered at all.

An interesting item to me though was the role of Xerox - once again, this company developed a concept outside of the realm of copying--what we think of as their main business. Here it was the precursor to Ethernet, in week 4 lecture it surfaced in the discussion about the evolution of Windows.

1 comment:

Caitlin Beery said...

I noticed the Xerox/PARC reference, too. However, I think it was in the history of the Macintosh computer that it was referred to in Week 4 lecture.