[ih] How long did it take?

[Olivier MJ Crépin-Leblond]

On 17/09/2026 17:02, Michael Grant via Internet-history wrote:
> This had me wondering how on earth would one use X.25 as "the OSI 
> internet" when X.25 had addresses that looked like phone numbers and 
> there was nothing like ARP on a wide area network and there were no 
> wide area routing protocols and ES-to-IS was only some vague dream, 
> there were no host names, not even a hosts.txt file floating around, 
> and nobody could tell me how any of this stuff fit together.  And not 
> to mention the TP0-TP4 non interoperability issue.
>
> I failed to see how X.25 could be used as an internet.
>
>
[...]
>
> It was quite obvious to me back then that no single vendor was going 
> to maintain some sort of hosts file.  There was no way to do any sort 
> of default route and I saw no one putting together any sort of global 
> routing of OSI addresses.  There was no way to use X.25 as an 
> internet.  I never could see the future here.  I mean, it was usable 
> if you had some private network or some private point-to-point link 
> you needed for some reason, but as some public internet like the 
> Internet, nope, even back then, I could not see how X.25 was ever 
> going to do that. 

...and yet, it did, to some extent. The UK JANET network did exactly 
that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET
Ok - so as an academic network, it was more of a large WAN with a 
central authority adding hosts, but a suite of software made it very 
usable indeed.

The Coloured Book Protocols ( 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols ) were, in my 
opinion, excellent.

The Triple-X PAD ( X.3, X.28, X.29) worked pretty well for the time akin 
to Telnet.
NIFTP was the version of FTP and was easy to use.
The Grey book protocols supported reliable email service.
The JANET NRS system saved us from needing to remember long connecting 
numbers and was also much more useful, coupled with the Grey book, to 
make use of decipherable email addresses resembling modern internet 
email addresses, thus saving us from the abomination that was X.400 
email notation.

You could also use client/server connections to transfer files 
interactively using third party software like Kermit. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_(protocol)

Whilst I wholeheartedly welcomed the migration to TCP-IP, IMHO, X.25 and 
was definitely not as "bad" as some might portray it today.

Kindest regards,

Olivier