[ih] Overlay networks

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 21-Aug-25 01:57, Joe Touch via Internet-history wrote:
...

> So overlays go back over 20yrs as an active area of investigation before the ones you found. Anyone know of earlier that explicitly layered a net on a working net? (Vs ones that arguably to this with different layers, as with bang-path routing of email in the 1980s)

As you say, the model is recursive. At CERN in the late 1980s we layered bridged Ethernet over CERNET (the in-house packet switching network) and layered TCP/IP, DECnet, and probably more on top of that. In the early 1980s, I personally layered a primitive version of OSI/CLNP directly over another rather obscure in-house packet switching network. This was just the obvious thing to do.

Regards/Ngā mihi
    Brian Carpenter