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.hinden@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
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.
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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