PART II CASE STUDY: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
227
PART THREE
NETWORKING
Chapter 7
Wide-Area Networks
7-1 Circuit-Switching Technology 238
7-2 Circuit-Switching Networks
249
7-3 Packet-Switching Networks
262
When Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village in the 1960s, he perhaps foresaw that beginning in the 1980s General Motors would operate a network that linked more than 500,000 computing devices and telephones and connected 18,000 locations worldwide. Or that American Airlines' SABER reservations network, linking more than 60,000 video terminals all over the planet to six massive mainframe computers, sometimes would post larger annual revenues than did the airline itself.