International Packet Switched Service
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The International Packet Switched Service (IPSS) was the first international and commercial
packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into '' packets'' that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the p ...
network. It was created in 1978 by a collaboration between Britain's
Post Office Telecommunications Post Office Telecommunications was set up as a separate department of the UK Post Office, in October 1969. The Post Office Act 1969 was passed to provide for greater efficiency in post and telephone services; rather than run a range of services, ...
, and the United States'
Western Union The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company cha ...
International and
Tymnet Tymnet was an international data communications network headquartered in Cupertino, California that used virtual call packet-switched technology and X.25, SNA/ SDLC, BSC and Async interfaces to connect host computers (servers) at thousands of la ...
.


History

This network grew from
Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...
and the United States to cover Canada,
Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...
and Australia by 1981, and by the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.. Companies and individual users could connect in to the network, via a PSS (
Packet Switch Stream In the United Kingdom, Packet Switch Stream (PSS) was an X.25-based packet-switched network, provided by the British Post Office Telecommunications and then British Telecommunications starting in 1980. After a period of pre-operational testing with ...
)
modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by Modulation#Digital modulati ...
, or an
X.25 X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet-switched data communication in wide area networks (WAN). It was originally defined by the International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee (CCITT, now ITU-T) in a series of drafts ...
PAD ( packet assembler/disassembler), and a dedicated PSS line, and use it to connect to a variety of online databases and mainframe systems. There was a choice of about three different speeds of PSS lines, although a faster line was more costly to rent. By 1984 British Telecom had joined the PSS to the global network and was providing IPSS services to customers. Companies including Dynatech, were providers of Interconnectivity and infrastructure devices including line drivers, modems, self configuring modems, 4 port, 8 port and 16 port PADs, and switches. These were physical boxes delivering full implementation of x.25, x.28, x.29 and x.3 protocols with physical connectivity conforming to RS232 asynchronous connectivity specification. In 1988 the IPSS directory listed approximately 800 global sites available for connection via X.25. The network later adopted
TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...
and provided infrastructure for the early
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
..


See also

*
History of the Internet The history of the Internet has its origin in information theory and the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and de ...
*
Public data network A public data network (PDN) is a network established and operated by a telecommunications administration, or a recognized private operating agency, for the specific purpose of providing data transmission services for the public. The first public p ...


References

{{reflist BT Group Computer-related introductions in 1978 General Post Office History of computing in the United Kingdom History of telecommunications in the United Kingdom Packets (information technology) Western Union X.25