ATM for Dummies, 1st edition
Authors: Idg Publishing, Cathy Gadecki
Venue:  (1996)

From the Book:I remember first reading about ATM on March 30, 1987, as a graduate student at Indiana University. For idle amusement, I used to go to the university's main library and pick books off the shelves at random, then open them to any page at all and start reading. On that particular night, the library's TK-TL section (where Mr. Dewey and his Decimals kept engineering texts) looked enticing and I happened upon the "Conference Record of the International Conference on Communications," dated June 1977, which contained Forgie and Nemeth's paper on "An efficient packetized voice/data network using statistical flow control." In 1977, the acronym ATM hadn't been concocted yet, but this paper, and others like it, introduced me to such concepts as virtual circuit and uniform-sized packets. I was fascinated and remain so to this day. Now, the reason I can pinpoint this night with such certitude is because - while I was Inside reading about this strange new technology (and wondering why the library was all but vacant) - the Indiana Hoosiers were busy winning the NCAA championship in New Orleans. The rest of the population of Bloomington, ablaze in rapturous giddiness, had taken temporary leave of its collective sanity. Inside the library's windowless walls, I was oblivious to all of this. Indeed, I didn't even realize our university had a basketball team to speak of. At 11:30, a voice on the speaker system Interrupted the quiet solitude: "The library will be closing in 15 minutes." Reluctantly, I packed my book bag, slung it over my shoulder, and walked out the front door into.....utter pandemonium! I watched with a mixture of confusion, awe, and trepidation as bumper-to- bumper cars, theirhorns blaring and crammed to the gills with way too many overly exuberant students, stood deadlocked in the worst traffic jam I'd ever seen. I guess my book bag gave me away because cries of "Whatta geek!" and "You nerd!" accompanied me all the way home.You won't find much argument with the assertion that in 1987, ATM's intrigue was limited to hard-core geeks and nerds. At that time, ATM existed merely as ink on a small but increasing number of very dry research papers on queuing theory, switch fabric design, and other heady matters - topics that held zero relevance to the daily concerns of network managers and planners. After several years, however, ATM slowly coalesced, and articles began to surface in the popular trade press. (My guess is that the l0baseT versus Token Ring wars were subsiding and telecommunications geeks had to have something controversial to write about.)By 1992, the hype surrounding ATM was beginning to escalate and, still very much interested in the technology, I formulated (petitioned?) a Usenet Call For Votes to create a newsgroup called comp.dcom.cell-relay. I intended to provide a discussion forum for All Things ATM. The vote passed, and in May of that year, the first messages started flowing. As is often the case on Usenet, the hype melted like butter against the fiery words of many of the newsgroup's contributors.While the newsgroup has been a blessing in the years since, I have often wished for a book about ATM that would distill the relevant pieces of this multifaceted and complex technology into a manageable form and present it in a way that clarifies its application in real-world networks. In other words, a book that provides, in a layperson's terms, answers to questions like: How do I use this stuff? What does it buy me? What do I need to get started? ATM For Dummies is that book! My thanks go out to the authors and to the folks at TeleChoice for a job well done.Allen RobelSenior Network AnalystIndiana University