Talk:PARC Universal Packet

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In Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (ISBN:0887308910), Michael Hiltzik quotes John Schoch saying "We were told [by Xerox] to participate," in ARPANET technical meetings, "but we were ordered not to describe what we were doing." (p. 293). Schoch goes on to suggest that PARC's networking people contributed to the development of internetworking protocols by asking "inscrutable but cunningly pointed questions" at the meetings, since they were prohibited by Xerox corporate from actually sharing what they had working in Palo Alto. Hiltzik concludes that significant pieces of the PUP architecture therby made it into the design of TCP/IP.

[edit] Merge

This could do with merging in to Xerox Network Services, since it is XNS was escentialy PUP with a different name. --John R. Barberio ^{talk, contribs} 21:31, 29 September 2005 (UTC)

Only in the same way that XNS and IP are the same things with different names. Have you actually read any PUP technical documentation? Noel (talk) 00:35, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

XNS appears to be a development of PUP into a more robust form, rather than a development across a diferent track. There *are* diferences, but the only major difference appears to be the replacement of Rendezvous and Termination Protocol and Byte Stream Protocol, with that of Sequenced Packet Protocol as a single transmision control.

Since these articles are purely of historical interest, it makes more sence to merge them as they are two versions of the same system. --John R. Barberio ^{talk, contribs} 10:18, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

That is not the only significant difference. PUP and XNS are two separate things, which had very different roles in terms of how they affected later work. Although there is a familial relationship, there's absolutely no reason to try and cover them in a single article, any more than we cover dozens of other groups of historical topics with a familial relationship in one article (e.g. the PDP-6 and PDP-10, which were so nearly identical that most PDP-6 assembler programs could run on a PDP-10). Noel (talk) 12:23, 1 October 2005 (UTC)

Now that I've thought about it some, and had a chance to review my PUP and XNS documentation, PUP and XNS are quite different. Not only are the transport layers completely different (RTP/BSP being totally unlike SPP), but the applications are even more different; the printing, filing etc protocols of the XNS stack are built on top of Courier. So my characterization of them as "lightly modified" is not really accurate. Noel (talk) 11:40, 2 October 2005 (UTC)