In the early 1980s, I was recruited by Case Communications, which sold data networking solutions to corporations.
Among the businesses to emerge from Cabletron will be one that builds networking gear for corporations and another that makes communications equipment for upstart phone companies.
3Com, which in recent years has had its headquarters in Marlborough, Mass., was one of the fastest-growing Silicon Valley companies in the late 1980s as computer networking caught on among corporations.
In an acknowledgement that the company has lost its battle with Cisco Systems csco, 3Com also will exit the business of selling data networking systems to large corporations, a market it led in the early 1990s.
That unit will provide data networking management services to large corporations.
The Internet was little more than a message board for scientists before corporations invested in networking technology.
"There's some honesty there," says Bob Nunnally of Balaya.com, a site aimed at bringing social networking to corporations.
Davies did not, of course, go on to found a mega-corporation and try to dominate data networking.
If history is any guide, however, these high-minded tutorials will be hard pressed to compete with the week's tightly packed schedule of cocktail parties and networking luncheons, many put on by the 1,000 major corporations underwriting the forum.
At the same time, the NSF proposed Internet2 to connect some 100 universities, research centers and several corporations in a high-bandwith environment to conduct networking research.
By the 2010s, corporations began to see that The Next Big Thing would be networking the physical world and gathering data from everything.
