Company Relationships

So, how does all this tie in with companies, you were asking? In regards to Signaling Schemes, Token Ring was pushed for quite some time by IBM. Ethernet beat out Token Ring when the Academicians aligned themselves with standards organizations to propel further enhancements to their favorite Signaling Scheme, Ethernet. Business quickly followed suite to produce excellent, and, ultimately through competition and mass production, very inexpensive network devices. Beneficiaries where Microsoft, Intel, AMD, Apple, Cisco, and of course, the public.

LocalTalk began to be replaced by Apple in their Macintosh line as the process described above took hold, allowing Apple to modernize their equipment with minimal expense. Apple continued and continues to run the inefficient AppleTalk protocol, but now they do it over the superior signaling scheme of Ethernet. AppleTalk over Ethernet is commonly called EtherTalk. AppleTalk is very inefficient, however, regardless of the Signaling Scheme.

NetBEUI is very similar to AppleTalk, and is not typically routed beyond a relatively small LAN. NetBEUI is Microsoft’s LAN protocol, and is what most people with small Windows-based networked machines use to transfer files.

IPX/SPX is Novell’s protocol. It was probably the most robust in design after TCP/IP, but lost out in the networking world in much the same way Token Ring lost out to Ethernet in the Signaling Scheme competition.

Traditional advocates of Ethernet and TCP/IP have been Intel, DEC (now Compaq), Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. Over time, Apple, Microsoft and even IBM have come into this camp such that today, there is little disagreement over what Signaling Scheme or protocol ought to be used in a given network setting – TCP/IP and Ethernet are the established standards.