Invention: It’s a DNA Thing…
Invention matters. Everything you use, touch or see was invented by someone who saw an unfulfilled need. Someone with imagination along with an idea of how to do something better, or how to fill a gap long overlooked, or how to enable entirely new goals to be met. Over time, invention has become the DNA of business, and it is this desire to create something new that drives the way people think and the way business is conducted over time.
Step back for a minute to 1977, before Ethernet (yes, it was called “Ethernet” not 802.anything) existed. Sure, there were older networking technologies developed for highly specific needs prior to 1977, but they were mainly point-to-point or telco-inspired circuit/packet switched technologies (like leased-lines and X.25). Pre-1977 networking was a challenge not for the faint of heart, and when two systems actually ‘connected’, limited information could be moved across ‘the network’. When that happened, technologists smiled, and business moved a baby step forward. Why a baby step? Because it was still very hard, it was slow, it was costly, and it was limited by the economics, applications, availability and overall business workflow models which were designed decades ago to be manually executed. Remember hand-carried manila folders, inter-office mail pouches, US Mail and FAX machines? That is how information flowed in those early days.
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Then in 1977 Bob Metcalfe (from Xerox, who later founded 3COM) was granted a patent (#4,063,220) on his invention of shared network media which leveraged his research project conducted in Xerox’s PARC center a few years earlier. Once the patent was in hand and socialized, Xerox, Intel and Digital got together in 1980 and published in-depth materials describing how this new Ethernet media could be used for business to create local area networks, or “LANs”. With a LAN, hundreds of devices could communicate with one another at a fraction of the cost and complexity seen in the past. Once the concept of a LAN existed, invention flourished and the next 10 years saw the industry’s brightest minds inventing ways to bring the power of a LAN to office workers, with companies like Banyan, Novell and Microsoft racing to bring products for file and print sharing to market. (And remember it wasn’t until 1995 with the invention of the Internet that business networking traversed corporate borders.)
Fast forward to today and it’s easy to see that business changed forever once LANs became part of its standard foundation. Over the years...