XNS

networking

Stands for: Xerox Network Systems

Xerox's late-1970s protocol architecture - the ancestral design that Novell IPX, and much else, copied.

Xerox Network Systems came out of PARC alongside Ethernet itself, and its layered design (the IDP datagram at its core) became the archetype early LAN vendors cloned. Novell's IPX is XNS with the serial numbers filed off; Banyan VINES and others borrowed too. XNS itself saw little direct deployment, but as a template it shaped a generation - notably except AppleTalk, which deliberately went its own way.

Also known as: xns, xerox network systems, idp, internet datagram protocol

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