In the mid-80s, the state of affairs in local networks began to change dramatically. Standard technologies for networking computers – Ethernet, Arcnet, Token Ring – were established. Personal computers served as a powerful stimulus for their development. These mass products were ideal elements for building networks – on the one hand, they were powerful enough to run network software, and on the other hand, they clearly needed to combine their computing power to solve complex problems, as well as the separation of expensive peripherals and disk arrays. Therefore, personal computers began to prevail in local networks, not only as client computers, but also as data storage and processing centers, i.e. network servers, ousting mini-computers and mainframes from these familiar roles.

Standard networking technologies turned the process of building a local network from an art into a chore. To create a network, it was enough to purchase network adapters of the appropriate standard, such as Ethernet, a standard cable, connect the adapters to the cable with standard connectors and install one of the popular network operating systems, such as NetWare, on the computer. After that, the network started working and joining each new computer caused no problems – of course, if the network adapter of the same technology was installed on it.

Local area networks, compared to wide area networks, introduced many new ways of organizing the user experience. Access to shared resources became much more convenient – the user could simply browse through lists of available resources rather than memorizing their identifiers or names. Once connected to a remote resource, it was possible to work with it using the commands already familiar to the user from working with local resources. The consequence and at the same time the driving force of such progress was the appearance of a huge number of non-professional users who did not need to learn special (and rather complicated) commands for networking. And the opportunity to realize all these conveniences developers of local networks received as a result of the emergence of high-quality cable lines, on which even the network adapters of the first generation provided data transfer speeds up to 10 Mbit / s.

Of course, the developers of global networks could not even dream of such speeds – they had to use the communication channels that were available, as the laying of new cable systems for computing networks with a length of thousands of kilometers would require huge capital investments. And “at hand” were only telephone communication channels, poorly adapted for high-speed transmission of discrete data – the speed of 1200 bps was a good achievement for them. Therefore, the economical use of bandwidth of communication channels was often the main criterion for the effectiveness of data transmission methods in global networks. Under these conditions, various procedures for transparent access to remote resources, standard for local networks, remained an unacceptable luxury for global networks for a long time.