INTRODUCTION:

What is networking?

Late 1970's were stand-alone computers introduced for those people who would just want to operate and manouver files, documents from home and from any businesses by just using and transferring files through the diskettes, and that is it! to another computers. But as time goes by from that time to the present, this would not be enough as enermous, gigantic storage and fast growing technology now a days has been overflowing in the market to take advantage of the networking power. Long years had past when sharing documents was to much work especially moving data from disk to disk to computer to computer basis, and if you ever wanted to print, computers should be connected locally to the printer, Isn't that a waste of time and effort? Umm,I guessed so!

So Networking was introduced to facilitate fast operation and transfer of shared resources easily, such as information, files, documents, hard drives, printer and also applications. Now let's cover some important components and terminologies of networking.

LAN(local area network)

Computers are interconnected in this infrastructure and they share resources within the single geographical location such computer or workstations within buildings or schools, although also extendable to other buildings so long they are closed each other.

WAN(Wide area network)

This technology uses modem and dedicated leased line such as DSL,T1 or T3, ATM, Frame relay and many more to facilitate connection from long distance communication and capable to span from different buildings, States, Countries, and even by Continental coverage.

MAN(Metropolitan area network)

Smaller than WAN but larger than LAN, it can span and connects LANS within the same city.

NODE - Devices that is conneted to the network
PACKET - A messge that is sent to one computer to another that contained address of the sender and the receiver.

SERVERS - Are the central location of resources (Example, File server,Web server, Dns server, Ftp server and many more).

NOS - (Network Operating System) - These run on the server system that contains resources and huge storages. Most popular NOS includes, Microsoft windows NT,2000, 2003 server, Unix, Novel netware, and also includes the comeback of popular Linux and Mac versions and distributions.