TOPS

The term TOPS is an acronym for many different things in this world. The meaning of the term changes with the change in the perspective this term is used in, for example this term is a name of a company, as well as that it also refers to a kind on clothing a women wear, however, this article will not deal with all these meanings. This article deals with this term with respect to the perspective of the networking world.

The term TOPS in the networking and computer world stands for Transparent Operating System. TOPS or transparent operating system was introduced to the world by the company named Sun Microsystems. It is a type of a local area network. A need for this LAN arose at the time when there was no way to connect the Apple Macintosh computers, PCs and Sun workstations on the same network. Before the release of this Transparent Operating System, the networking world had to face the problem of combining these three different technologies together to work on one network.

The release of this technology solved the problem quite easily. The biggest advantage of this technology is that the software which is working in this technology is transparent, that is, the users do not specifically need to do something to adjust to this new operating environment, moreover, there is no specific single interface to which everyone needs to get accustomed to, that is, the PC users will see their PC interface and the MAC users will see their MAC interface.

TOPS basically is a peer-to-peer network as it makes use of the Macintosh computer’s built in AppleTalk protocol. The biggest advantage of this property is that there is no need for any computer to be set aside as file servers and the authorized users can access any file from and disk drive that is connected to the network.