[Tech1] BBC News at Ten new look

[Alec Bray]

Hi,

When I first went into IT working with Paul Whitehouse, we were at - or 
nearly at - the bleeding edge of networking (we didn't package in big 
red boxes like Novell....). I was involved in trying to trademark our 
networking technology - called the Advanced Networking System or ANS.  
Couldn't get it trademarked as there is a town in Belgium called ANS and 
of course that would cause total confusion - not! Around 1990 there was 
great interest in voice over the internet,  At that time there were two 
major systems  X.25 and IP.  X.25 was European and Connection Oriented - 
that is, you sent a packet of data, the recipient replied  that that 
data packet had been received,  and then you sent the next packet.  Each 
packet went through 7 layers of processing before being presented to the 
user. IP - the Internet Protocol - was American and connectionless - 
that is you banged of a packet and hoped it got to the recipient: in 
fact you banged packet after packet only limited by the low-level 
technology such as Ethernet.

At that time - I must stress at that time in the 1990s - there was a 
great discussion about transmission of voice over the internet - and in 
particular about Voice over IP.  Basically the sound stream has to be 
broken up into packets, and these packets of data handed down to the 
network..  There was great discussion as to what would happen to sound 
if the recipient lost - or lost track of - packets of data - hunks of 
sound would be missing.  (On X.25 the packets would have to be resent).  
The Internet Protocol only had 4 levels of processing and was inherently 
much faster (at the cost of accuracy) - and was American - so you got 
the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), The Simple Network Management 
Protocol (SNMP) - and lots of other things including VoIP all running on 
the Internet Protocol.

Pictures are not quite the same - what is transmitted is the difference 
between one frame and the next so if you missed a few packets just some 
of the picture would not be updated and you may not even notice (unless 
there was a lot of whizzy action...).

Now all of this is of course a long long time ago (aeons for IT) and I 
certainly have not kept up to date with all the changes - and surely 
there must be myriads - by 2000 I had moved into software configuration 
and change management, a whole different ball game!

-- 
=======

Alec Bray

alec.bray.2 at gmail.com
Mob:  07789 561 346
Tel:  0118 981 7502
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