Introduction
In the beginning, there was a single computer. Soon it connected to other computers and became a local area network (LAN). LANs allowed files, printers, and applications to be shared freely and securely throughout an organization. For a short time, a LAN was sufficient in most organizations, but soon the need arose to interconnect LANs to provide enterprisewide data availability.
As you might imagine, connecting LANs together provided a challenge simply because of the distances separating them. Some were across town, and some were thousands of miles apart, which was a long way to run a segment of coaxial cable.
New technologies such as X.25 were introduced that could span these distances, and the wide area network (WAN) was born. ...
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