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Realization of the potential benefits that can come from the connectivity to information resources provided by computer networks will require the development of a variety of users' tools. Physical access to very large information repositories—the electronic equivalent of major libraries, for example—will be of little value unless users have effective methods for getting at the information they need or want without spending an undue amount of time and effort in unproductive search. As Bromley (1986:628) has put it:
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We begin with a brief historical overview of computer-communications networking technology. We then focus on current trends, especially the phenomenon of "global connectivity" that networking is coming to represent and some of the implications this could have. In the remainder of the chapter we discuss some of the human factors issues and research needs that relate to networking and its future development and applications.
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Networks that link computers from different geographical locations are a relatively recent phenomenon. Since the first such networks were implemented, the technology has advanced rapidly. It appears that this rapid advance will continue and that applications of the technology will become increasingly widespread over the near term.
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geographically distributed computers were established in the mid-1960s (Davies and Barber, 1973; Marrill and Roberts, 1966). The ARPANET, which was to become the largest operational network in the world and to remain so for many years, was started as a four-node system by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense in 1969 (Heart, 1975; Heart et al., 1978). According to Pool (1993), its successor, the Internet, connected about 1.7 million host computers and between 5 million and 15 million users as of 1993, and the numbers have been doubling annually.
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The establishment and proliferation of computer networks have been accompanied—indeed made possible—by an ever-increasing blurring of the distinction between computer and communication technologies. The Internet and the many smaller networks that connect to it depend on computing resources for all aspects of their operation and for the provision of the various services, such as electronic mail and bulletin boards, teleconferencing, information utilities, and the many others that they offer.
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Not only have networks been rapidly increasing in number and size; the bandwidth or "throughput" capacity of the individual links of which they are composed has been expanding greatly as well. Wide-area networks now typically operate at 1.5 megabits (million bits) per second, and many local-area networks have transmission rates of 10 megabits per second. Systems that use optical fibers as the transmission medium support rates of 100 megabits and, in a few cases, 1 gigabit (billion bit).
