Communications standards review
Avi Schonbach · ACM SIGSMALL/PC Notes · 1987
This is the first in a series of reports which will survey activities in the area of communications standards. The increasingly strong influence of such standards on the computer industry is plainly manifested in the move from central to distributed computing. The main relevance of communications to small systems lies in the fact that they are necessary to both distributed processing and resource sharing. Small systems have limited resources locally; in an interlinked environment jobs which are too large for the local resources can be submitted for execution on other systems. As well, special servers can be shared by a large number of users, thereby reducing overall cost. Communications provide the user of a small system with access to remote information systems, and with support of networked interest groups through applications such as electronic mail and bulletin board.