Sytek, Inc., known as Hughes LAN Systems, Inc. (HLS), after being acquired by

Hughes Electronics Hughes Electronics Corporation was formed in 1985, when Hughes Aircraft was sold by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to General Motors for $5.2 billion. Surviving parts of Hughes Electronics are today known as DirecTV Group, while the automoti ...

and known as Whittaker Communications, Inc. (WCI), since April 24, 1995, created the

NetBIOS NetBIOS () is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, Net ...

API, used by Microsoft to make its early networks. Sytek was founded in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

and last officed in their own building on Charleston Road in Mountain View. During this crucial period in

LAN Lan or LAN may refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in space * ...

development, there were two factions within

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

competing over the basic LAN architecture. One group, the telco switch folks from Geneva liked a central hub, with a network of distributed twisted pair conductors, as is used in phone systems. The other group, Entry Systems Division from Boca Raton, liked the idea of a distributed bus architecture. Building on prior work done by such companies as Intech Labs (aka American Modem & AMDAX), Sytek built an RF

transceiver In radio communication, a transceiver is an electronic device which is a combination of a radio ''trans''mitter and a re''ceiver'', hence the name. It can both transmit and receive radio waves using an antenna, for communication purposes. The ...

that operated on cable TV frequencies. It received in the High VHF band and transmitted in the Low VHF band. These bands were referred to as the forward and reverse channels. Within any given frequency band, it was possible to have many, many, virtual circuits between devices. In order to increase the advantage of using FDM on the cable, Sytek added an algorithm based on CSMA/CD. There were few, if any, IEEE standards at that time. All of the devices, called T-Boxes, were equipped with an EIA

RS-232 In telecommunications, RS-232 or Recommended Standard 232 is a standard introduced in 1960 for serial communication transmission of data. It formally defines signals connecting between a ''DTE'' (''data terminal equipment'') such as a compu ...

serial interface, which had a 'legal' maximum data rate of 19.2 kbit/s. While this may seem slow by today's standards, it was considered very fast in 1982. Determining a need for PC-PC and (especially) PC-mainframe communications, IBM asked Sytek to manufacture LAN adapter cards based on their FDM/TDM technology for IBM PCs, which they did. IBM saw the value of PCs as being a catalyst to sell more mainframe computers and understood that a LAN of the type Sytek made was superior to dedicated runs of RG-62 coaxial cable, which were required for 327X terminals and controllers. These

IBM PC Network The IBM PC Network was IBM PC's first LAN system. It consisted of network cards, cables, and a small device driver known as NetBIOS (Network Basic Input/Output System). It used a data rate of and carrier-sense multiple access with collision de ...

cards were available, from IBM for about $700 ea. In the mid-80s, IBM moved its focus to

Token Ring Token Ring is a Physical layer, physical and data link layer computer networking technology used to build local area networks. It was introduced by IBM in 1984, and standardized in 1989 as IEEE Standards Association, IEEE 802.5. It uses a sp ...

, and much of the rest of the market moved to

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

References

External links

Setting Up OS/2 Peer-to-Peer Networking & Coexistence of Warp & NT Machines on the MITNet

Sytek brochures at bitsavers.org
{{ict-company-stub 1979 establishments in California 1995 mergers and acquisitions 1996 disestablishments in California 1996 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1979 American companies disestablished in 1996 Computer companies established in 1979 Computer companies disestablished in 1996 Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies established in 1979 Software companies disestablished in 1996

See also

References

External links