Objectives
- Investigate the need and motivation for networking computers together
- Learn a little bit about the history of networking, protocols and
the Internet
- Learn about how bits are transmitted over a wire and several ways
to counteract errors using clever encoding schemes
- Learn about packets, the fundamental "chunk" of information sent
between computers
- Learn about protocols and protocol suites and how they make it
easier to connect computers from different vendors
- Get itnroduced to TCP/IP
- Learn about connectionless and connection-oriented transmission
- Investigate how a connection can be made almost error-free
- Differentiate between wide area networks (WANs)
and local area networks (LANs)
- Learn a little bit about Ethernet and token-ring
- List some of the more common network topologies
- Learn how computers are addressed in a network, including the Internet
- Learn how routing is used to get messages and packets to their final
destination even if there is no direct connection between the two computers
- Make connections between networks, buses and parallel computers
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Prerequisites
This chapter is self-contained, although the workings of buses (Chapter 16)
are relevant. Topology is mentioned in chapter 20 (parallel computers)
as well.
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