Turning back the clock 10 years: Our tenth anniversary

Set the time machine to October 1995 and jump in. Hardware vendors were pushing 100VG-AnyLAN and token ring. Nynex, US West, Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell provided local phone service. Novell was proposing a ‘SuperNOS’ to unify NetWare and Unix. Microsoft had just rolled out Windows 95, which featured its answer to Netscape, something called Internet Explorer 1.0.

Set the time machine to October 1995 and jump in. Hardware vendors were pushing 100VG-AnyLAN and token ring. Nynex, US West, Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell provided local phone service. Novell was proposing a “SuperNOS” to unify NetWare and Unix. Microsoft had just rolled out Windows 95, which featured its answer to Netscape, something called Internet Explorer 1.0. That new addition to Windows would prove helpful to a couple of start-ups called Amazon.com and eBay, which were trying to convince people it was safe to buy things online.

October 1995 also was when we launched Network World Fusion (now recast as NetworkWorld.com) – at NetWorld+Interop Atlanta (where Bay Networks had a booth). I used Windows (3.1) Notepad to assemble news stories for posting on the site (I FTP’d them by hand).

It’s amazing how far we’ve come. Gigabit Ethernet to the desktop, 10G backbones and fiber to the home are all realities now (and today’s inexpensive PCs can do a lot more than 1995’s expensive servers). At Network World, we now use a sophisticated content management system to serve up everything from breaking news to RSS feeds and video Web casts – from a server farm running not only proprietary Oracle databases but also a variety of open source applications.

Of course, it hasn’t been all wine and roses. How much money and time do you spend worrying about – and fighting off – everything from spyware to denial-of-service attacks? Oh, for the days when the big worry was all those “enormous” animated-GIF Christmas cards that clogged up the e-mail server. But some things never seem to change. Writing on his IT Borderlands blog, Ken Fasimpaur recalls when he was working for a technology company in 1995 that ultimately went belly up: “Simply put, none of us, not the managers and not the developers, really knew what was going on around us technologically and socially speaking. The young developers were too concentrated on just getting the job done. The managers, of a much more mature and stolid disposition, were committed to sustaining the present scenario but not to studying the unfolding future. One could blame lack of resources on both fronts, but in any event there was simply no investment made to keep looking ahead. Under normal circumstances this might have been survivable, but when poised on the edge of a radical shift, it was a disaster waiting to happen.” What are your reminiscences of enterprise networking in 1995? And how are you preparing for the future? Come over to the NetworkWorld.com community, where we have a forum going on the topic.