Impact
Last used by Xerox for communication with the DocuTech 135 Publishing System, XNS is no longer in use, due to the ubiquity of IP. However, it played an important role in the development of networking technology in the 1980s, by influencing software and hardware vendors to seriously consider the need for computing platforms to support more than one network protocol stack simultaneously.
In particular, it helped to validate the design of the 4.2BSD network subsystem by providing a second protocol suite, one which was significantly different from the Internet protocols; by implementing both stacks in the same kernel, Berkeley researchers demonstrated that the design was suitable for more than just IP. Some modifications were eventually necessary to support the full range of Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocols.
Read more about this topic: Xerox Network Systems
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“The question confronting the Church today is not any longer whether the man in the street can grasp a religious message, but how to employ the communications media so as to let him have the full impact of the Gospel message.”
—Pope John Paul II (b. 1920)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)
“Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)