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Basics of Network

© Muhammad Ahsan

Although it's late to discuss this very basic issue, my friends asked me to write something on 'networks' for those people who do not know about the 'network' in its real sense. I have described many articles on Local Area Network but this special topic is dedicated for those people who want to initialize their learning from the very beginning. My first article 'LANing' was very short description of LANs because, you know, I had to tell the managers of Suite101 Inc that how much I know about the LANs. Finally I had brief the LANs. Now, I want to describe as a whole thing, every point I know about the LANs. I hope you people got my point.

A network is a group of interconnected systems sharing services and interacting by means of a shared communications link. A network, therefore, requires two or more individual systems with something to share (data). The individual systems must be connected through a physical pathway (called the transmission medium). All systems on the physical pathway must follow a set of common communication rules for data to arrive at its intended destination and for the sending and receiving systems to understand each other. The rules that govern computer communications are called the 'Protocols'.

BRIEF: At its simplest, a computer network is two or more computers sharing information across a common transmission medium.

In summary, all networks must have the following:

1. Something to share (Data).
2. A Physical Pathway (Transmission Medium).
3. Rules of Communication (Protocols).

Merely having a transmission pathway doesn't produce communication. When two entities communicate, they do not merely exchange data; rather, they understand the data they receive from each other. The goal of computer networking, therefore, is not simply to exchange data, but to be able to understand and use data received from other entities on the network.

Because all computers are different, are used in different ways, and can be located at different distances from each other, enabling computers to communicate is often a daunting task that draws on a wide variety of technologies.

NOTE: Remembering that the term 'network' can be applied to human communication can be useful. When you are in a classroom, for example, the people in that class form a human information network. In computer terms, the instructor is the server, and the students are network clients. When the instructor speaks, the language he uses is equivalent to a computer protocol. If the instructor speaks French, and the student understands only English, the lack of a common protocol makes productive communication difficult. Likewise, air is the transmission medium for human communication. Sound is really nothing more than wave vibrations transmitted across the air to our eardrums, which receive and interpret the signals. In a vacuum, we cannot communicate via speech because our transmission pathway is gone.