Editing ARCNET (section)

=== Development ===
ARCNET was developed by principal development engineer [[John Murphy (engineer)|John Murphy]], at [[Datapoint]] Corporation in 1976 under [[Victor Poor]], and announced in 1977.<ref>{{Cite web |title=ARCNET and the ATA History |url=https://arcnet.cc/history.htm |access-date=2022-10-14 |website=arcnet.cc}}</ref> It was originally developed to connect groups of their [[Datapoint 2200]] terminals to talk to a shared 8" floppy disk system. It was the first loosely coupled LAN-based clustering system, making no assumptions about the ''type'' of computers that would be connected. This was in contrast to contemporary larger and more expensive computer systems such as [[DECnet]] or IBM's [[Systems Network Architecture|SNA]], where a homogeneous group of similar or proprietary computers were connected as a [[VMScluster|cluster]].

The token-passing bus protocol of that I/O device-sharing network was subsequently applied to allowing processing nodes to communicate with each other for file-serving and computing scalability purposes. An application could be developed in DATABUS, Datapoint's proprietary [[COBOL]]-like language, and deployed on a single computer with dumb terminals. When the number of users outgrew the capacity of the original computer, additional 'compute' resource computers could be attached via ARCNET to run the same applications and access the same data. If more storage was needed, additional disk resource computers could also be attached. This incremental approach broke new ground and by the end of the 1970s (before the first [[IBM PC]] was announced in 1981), over ten thousand ARCNET LAN installations were in commercial use around the world while Datapoint had become a Fortune 500 company. As microcomputers took over the industry, well-proven and reliable ARCNET was also offered as an inexpensive LAN for these machines.