Xerox Network Systems

Xerox Network Systems

Xerox Network Services (XNS) is a protocol suite developed by Xerox within the Xerox Network Systems Architecture. It provided general purpose network communications, internetwork routing and packet delivery, including higher level functions such as a reliable stream, and remote procedure calls. XNS predated and influenced the development of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) networking model.

XNS was developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1980s, based heavily on the earlier (and extremely influential) PARC Universal Packet (PUP) protocol suite done there in the late 1970s; some of the protocols in the XNS suite were lightly modified versions of the ones in the PUP suite. XNS was intended to be a commercial descendant of the research/development oriented PUP. The protocol suite specifications were placed in the public domain.

Being in the public domain, XNS became a canonical local area networking protocol in the 1980s, copied to various degrees by practically all networking systems in use into the 1990s. It had little impact on TCP/IP, however. During the 1980s XNS was used by 3Com and, with modifications, by a number of other commercial systems which became more common than XNS itself, including Ungermann-Bass Net/One, Novell NetWare, and Banyan VINES.

Read more about Xerox Network Systems:  Basic Internetwork Protocol, Transport Layer Protocols, Applications, Impact

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