1. The first local network. Creating a standard lan technologies

Sometimes, a person wants to communicate information to a single individual. At other times, the person may need to send information to a group of people at the same time, or even to all people in the same area. A conversation between two people is an example of a one-to-one pattern of communication. When a group of recipients need to receive the same message simultaneously, a one-to-many or one-to-all message pattern is necessary. The increasing demand and use of computers in universities and research labs in the late 1960s generated the need to provide high-speed interconnections between computer systems. A 1970 report from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory detailing the growth of their "Octopus" network gave a good indication of the situation. Cambridge Ring was developed at Cambridge University in 1974 but was never developed into a successful commercial product. Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC in 1973–1975, and filed as U.S. Local Area Network (LAN) is a data communications network connecting terminals, computers and printers within a building or other geographically limited areas. These devices could be connected through wired cables or wireless links. Example: Ethernet, Token Ring and Wireless LAN using IEEE 802.11. Most commonly used LAN Technology- Ethernet. Token Ring technology is still used by some companies. FDDI is sometimes used as a backbone LAN interconnecting Ethernet or Token Ring LANs. Local Area Network could be interconnected using Wide Area Network (WAN) or Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) technologies. The common WAN technologies include TCP/IP, ATM, Frame Relay etc. The common MAN technologies include SMDS and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. LANs are traditionally used to connect a group of people who are in the same local area. However, the working group are becoming more geographically distributed in today's working environment. There, virtual LAN (VLAN) technologies are defined for people in different places to share the same networking resource. Local Area Network protocols are mostly at data link layer (layer 2). IEEE is the leading organization defining most of the LAN protocols

2.Current trends. Computer networks. The concept of a computer network.

Recent developments in computers and technology as a whole have meant there have been increasingly fast developments in computer networking trends. The move by the government to bring in the digital economy bill means that it is moving away from manufacturing and financial services in to encouraging nations to get involved in creating intellectual property in the area of computer games, pharmaceuticals, video, music and film.  There is also an accelerated shift encouraging companies to marry communication platforms. There is huge demand in things such as video networking and social media networking the arena currently. The other trend has been to give workers a wireless environment so they don't have physical phone or computer connections, which allows them to move freely around the office.  The other side of the social media networking coin is for businesses to be able to reach out to business with social media networking and capture them that way. To ensure this is done to the best of ability communications networks, especially mobile ones are being upgraded and made faster. This increases the amount of speed and the mobile communication that people can engage in.

This has all lead to a shift in the amount of care that people have about their information, with increased speeds meaning people can use their downloaded apps anywhere; there has been a rapid amount of marketing information taken from people in exchange for the use of these applications. This is set to be an ever increasing trend in the future.

A computer network, or simply a network, is a collection of computers and other hardware interconnected by communication channels that allow sharing of resources and information.^[1] Where at least one process in one device is able to send/receive data to/from at least one process residing in a remote device, then the two devices are said to be in a network. A network is a group of devices connected to each other. Networks may be classified into a wide variety of characteristics: the medium used to transport the data, communications protocol used, scale, topology, benefit, and organizational scope.