Datapoint-ARC

The ARC System (announced on Dec. 1, 1977) was the world's first commercially available LAN (Local Area Network) system, which made it possible for networks of distributed, personal-sized desktop computers to replace the mainframe computers that were once the staple of business computing. This video was produced by Datapoint Corporation to explain the concept of local area networks to the public, and was widely shown at the National Computer Conferences in the 1978-1979 timeframe. It's interesting to note that The ARC System was (until less than a month before the announcement) actually called "Internet" but the company decided to change the name at the last minute, feeling that the public perceptions were that "networks are complicated and hard to manage" and that the product wouldn't be successful with that name. ;-) Among other innovations was ARC's ability to map shared, server-resident disk volumes to imaginary local disk drives on workstations, allowing applications to easily access shared remote volumes, and a concept which is still widely used with LANs to this day.