What Is NetBIOS

6 Pages 1409 Words

What Is NetBIOS

NetBIOS (Network Basic Input/Output System) was developed by IBM and Sytek as an Application Programming Interface (API) for client software to access LAN resources. Ever since its creation, NetBIOS has become the basis for many other networking applications. In a sense, NetBIOS is an interface specification for the accessing of networking services.
NetBIOS is a layer of software developed to link a network operating system with specific hardware, was originally designed as the network controller for IBM's Network LAN. NetBIOS has now been extended to allow programs written using the NetBIOS interface to operate on other types of network architectures. NetBIOS has since been adopted as an industry standard for use with Windows 95 – NT4 and it is common to refer to these as NetBIOS-compatible LANs.
It offers network applications to carry out inter-application communication and data transfer. In a basic sense, NetBIOS allows applications to communicate with the network. Its intention is to isolate the application layer of the OSI Model from any type of hardware dependencies. It also spares software developers the task of developing network error recovery and low level message addressing or routing. The use of the NetBIOS interface does allot of this work for them.
NetBIOS standardizes the communication interface between applications and a LANs operating capabilities. With this, it can be specified to which levels of the OSI model the application can write to, making the application transportable to other networks via that same layer. In a NetBIOS LAN environment, computers are known on the system by a NetBIOS name. Each computer on the network has a permanent name that is programmed in various different ways. These names will be discussed in more detail below.
Terminals on a NetBIOS LAN communicate either by establishing a session or by using NetBIOS datagram or broadcast methods. Sessions allow for a la...