Coloured Book protocols

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Coloured Book protocols were a set of X.25 protocols used on JANET between the mid-1980s and 1992. After 1992, Internet standards were adopted on JANET instead; they were operated simultaneously for a while, but eventually X.25 support faded away.

The standards were:

• The Pink Book defined protocols for transport over the local network, based on Ethernet
• The Orange Book defined protocols for transport over the local network, based on the Cambridge Ring
• The Yellow Book defined transport-layer protocols
• The Green Book defined protocols to connect terminals together, similar to telnet
• The Grey Book defined protocols for email transfer (not file transfer as is sometimes claimed)
• The Blue Book defined protocols for file transfer, similar to FTP
• The Red Book defined a mechanism for jobs to be transferred from one computer to another, and for the output to be returned to the originating computer

One famous quirk of Grey Book was that hostnames were backwards compared to the Internet standard. For example, an address might be acc@UK.AC.HATFIELD.STAR instead of acc@star.hatfield.ac.uk. For more information, see JANET NRS.

[edit] References

• A Dictionary of Computing. Oxford University Press, 2004, s.v. "coloured book"

[edit] External links

• alt.folklore.computers: "What is the British Grey Book protocol?"