Excerpt from A Review of Network Access Techniques With a Case Study: The Network Access Machine

The computer industry's ability to serve a diverse and expanding user community is evidenced by the rapid growth of computer network services. Little over a decade ago, when people began to interact with computers in the routine performance of their jobs, few cared about the differences between similar service offerings all were eager to learn and experiment with that new technology.

Today, with the advent and growth of computer networks, that modest size group of scientists, engineers, and researchers has grown to include professionals in all sciences mathematical, physical, health, and social as well as students, stock brokers, and reservation clerks from many fields. Just as the number of users has grown so has the number and diversity of computer services.

Computer service providers design and market their own offerings as they deem best, given their own market and their own set of resources. Trends in service growth, traceable through individual families of mainframes, operating systems, and service packages, lack direction and consistency from the user's point of view. The reasons for this fragmented growth might be justified considering constraints imposed by telecommunications facilities, peculiarities imposed by mainframes and their operating systems, and the personal preferences of system developers. Unfortunately, many of these services are characterized by different implementations of the logically similar steps that users must take in order to accomplish productive work.

Today we have a situation in which more and more users are consuming more and more services while the services themselves perpetuate differing user procedures for access to the same logical services. A reasonable question to ask is what can be done to help the user? Standardization of access procedures is a possible solution. However, a procedure for access that makes one service more attractive than another through enhanced features should not be compromised by a premature effort to standardize such procedures especially if the standard settles on lowest common denominator features. Encouraging competition among network service providers can be in the user's best interest if it leads to innovation in the amount and quality of service received and in the reduction of costs in providing the service. Rather than push for extensive user-oriented uniformity, it may be desirable to continue to permit and encourage such non-uniformity, but to compensate for it through network access assistance to the user.

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