Peer to Peer for Not Yet Techies

Peer to peer network is one of the major types of networks. However, they do not scale well -- which is a techie term meaning that peer to peer networks can work well on a small scale but not on a large. These days only a very small or home business would consider using such a type of network.

Basically, a peer to peer network is one in which all the computers are hooked up to each other by cable in a ring. Say we're in an office with 5 PCs and the boss decides to hook all PCs into a network. Five computers is few enough to make it work. The boss doesn't have to buy a more expensive large computer known as a server.

All 5 PCs have NIC / Network Interface Cards attached to the back and they're all hooked up with cable and that's the peer to peer network.

I can start a program running on your computer. I can read a text file you've saved to your hard drive. You can open a .jpg file I downloaded from the Internet. Oops!

So is your computer's CPU / Central Processing Unit, which means that if John is running a powerful graphics editing program that bogs his computer down, it can reach out over the cables and use your unused processing power.

That means that you might go to your desk sometimes and find that your computer is tied up with an hourglass because your neighbor is running a spreadsheet program that'll take four hours to finish, even with the help of your CPU and even though you have a report to finish within one hour.

That's peer to peer networks - every computer can act as a client or a server to every other computer on the network.

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