DECnet
lorenetworking
Stands for: DECnet (Digital Equipment Corporation network protocols)
Digital Equipment Corporation's networking suite - the protocol that ran the VAX era, evolving from proprietary roots toward OSI.
DECnet (formally Digital Network Architecture, DNA) connected DEC's PDP and VAX machines from the mid-1970s. Phase IV was the widely deployed peer-to-peer version of the 1980s; Phase V realigned it onto OSI protocols as the industry standardized. It shared 1990s Ethernet segments with AppleTalk and IPX before TCP/IP displaced them all - a name every network engineer of the minicomputer era knew, and part of the lineage behind vendors like Cabletron that grew up wiring those machines.
Also known as: decnet, dna, digital network architecture, phase iv, phase v