[ih] How long did it take?

[John Day]

Whoa! Why am I not surprised. Incredible.

 Really a good thing Baran didn’t take them up on their offer to build one.

If the X.25 service came out in 83, they must have decided it was important a few years earlier. 1980-ish?

A billion dollar loss. Wow! And that was when a billion dollars was real money.

> On Sep 16, 2026, at 20:33, Leonard Kleinrock <lk at cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> 
> ATT struggled to launch a packet switched service which they finally offered in 1983 as the ACS Net 1000 service. This was nearly 14 years after the Arpanet was launched and still they screwed it up. It was a clumsy expensive service and they thought they could offer storage and computation to the fortune 1000 community, something they did not need. They shut it down in 1984 at $1 billion loss.
> Len
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> 
>> On Sep 16, 2026, at 5:06 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Grok sez:
>> 
>> AT&T operated X.25 packet-switched networks in the 1980s.
>> 
>> The main one was ACCUNET Packet Service, a public data network that AT&T
>> launched as a regulated basic service. The FCC tariff took effect 18 August
>> 1984. By 1986 it had 99 service points in the U.S. Subscriber interfaces
>> followed CCITT X.25 (1980 recommendation, with a later move toward the 1984
>> version). It offered switched virtual calls and permanent virtual circuits
>> over access lines at 4.8, 9.6, and 56 kbps (via Dataphone Digital Service
>> or analog private lines). Nodes were interconnected with 56 kbps DDS
>> facilities.
>> 
>> AT&T also ran a separate value-added X.25 service called Net 1000 (AIS*Net
>> 1000) through its unregulated subsidiary (American Bell / AT&T Information
>> Systems). That offering added protocol conversion, processing, and storage
>> on top of an underlying X.25 packet network supplied by the regulated side
>> of AT&T. It was withdrawn in 1986 after large losses.
>> 
>> After the 1984 breakup, the long-distance AT&T entity continued ACCUNET
>> Packet Service while the Regional Bell Operating Companies offered their
>> own intra-LATA X.25 packet services (some of those RBOCs later became part
>> of today’s AT&T). Bell Labs also did packet-switching research and built
>> systems such as LADT that used X.25 internally.
>> 
>> AT&T was late to commercial packet switching compared with Telenet and
>> Tymnet, but it did own and operate X.25 networks once it entered the market.
>> 
>> ➔➔https://x.com/i/grok?conversation=2100374688069489036
>> 
>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 16, 2026 at 4:07 PM John Day via Internet-history <
>>> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>> 
>>> In the 60s, Baran backed out of an offer from AT&T to build a packet
>>> switched network because he sensed wisely they didn’t believe in it and
>>> would not put the effort into to make it real.
>>> 
>>> We also all know the story from the ARPANET demo at ICCC72 when Bob
>>> Metcalfe was demoing the TIP to several AT&T attendees. The TIP crashed and
>>> re-booted from its neighbors. Bob thought this was a great aspect of the
>>> system. The AT&T guys thought it showed the ARPANET was a joke and not
>>> serious.
>>> 
>>> So when did AT&T start to take packet switching seriously?
>>> 
>>> Take care,
>>> John
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>> 
>> --
>> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
>> living as The Truth is True
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