[ih] X.25

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 03-Oct-25 06:41, Lyndon Nerenberg (VE7TFX/VE6BBM) via Internet-history wrote:
> John Levine via Internet-history writes:
> 
>> I was a long time uucp user and I do not ever recall running
>> into anyone who used it over X.25.
>>
>> This web page says that the widely used Taylor uucp
>> had an 'x' protocol for X.25 but also says it doesn't work:
> 
> Berkeley (I think?) added the 'f' protocol for use over X.25 via
> PADs.  It encoded 8-bit traffic into 7-bit values, used xon/xoff
> flow control, and probably had a few other quirks I forget.  And
> it was certainly used, at least in Canada.  Before CA*net was formed,
> the U of Alberta, UBC, U of Waterloo, and probably U of Toronto,
> all swapped mail and Usenet over Datapac via UUCP running 'f'.  When
> I set up APSS (Alberta Disaster Services), I set up a UUCP link
> over Datapac with the UofA running 'f' protocol to relay news amd
> mail.  It was a real thing.

The irony being that Datapac was merely an X.25 wrapper on an underlying
connectionless packet-switched network [1] [2].

As others have said, IP over X.25 was fairly common in Europe, for financial
or political reasons. In fact several European efforts at everything-over-X.25
can be found in the two relevant history books [3] [4].

    Brian

[1] https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/research/groups/CDMTCS/researchreports/download.php?selected-id=884
[2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6592834
[3] http://ictconsulting.ch/reports/european-research-internet-history.pdf
[4] https://doi.org/10.1002/9783527629336