X.25 was a disaster area. I watched someone trying to code a PAD in 1984,
took him months to realize that the reason it did not work is that the spec
did not correspond to the bits on the wire.
The idea for X.25 certainly did not come out of BBN or the ARPANET. Many
groups round the world were looking at computer networking schemes in the
1970s. X.25 was a consensus that emerged from a group of (mostly) European
engineers.
Far from being an incremental evolution of the ARPANET, Orange Book was
essentially Spock with Beard. The ARPANET was a research network whose
development was mostly led by academics with some input from corporations.
Coloured Books was a commercial network from the start and development was
led by telephone company engineers with occasional academics.
X.25 was a direct descendant of the capabilities of the (then) planned
System X digital telephone system in the UK and similar systems in France
and Germany.
On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 3:04 PM, Bob Hinden
<bob(_dot_)hinden(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Sep 14, 2010, at 5:08 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:
I wonder how many people realize that X.25 was a direct descendant of
ARPANET, and that BB&N became a leading supplier of X.25 hardware simply by
continuing the IMP down its evolutionary path.
I was at BBN at the time this was going on. BBN implemented X.25 because
it needed a "standardized" interface to the network instead of BBN's
proprietary 1822 interface and choose X.25. X.25 was developed in parallel
to the Arpanet and I disagree that it "was a direct descendant of ARPANET".
It has a very different interface (connection oriented vs. message
oriented) that IMHO was not an improvement.
Bob
p.s. I suggest that BBN use Ethernet instead but that didn't get any
traction. I am pretty sure the world would be different had they followed
my suggestion.
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