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Communications Network
Networking in the 1980s was complex with a mixture of older asynchronous connections and emerging standards for local and wide area packet switching.
While the prototype military IP network was being developed in the USA, here in the UK the Universities JANET wide area network was based on X.25
and the national Joint Network Team were aiming to move from the established Coloured Book protocols for mail,FTP etc. to the new ISO OSI protocols such as X.400 for mail.
Here is the planning document produced by Frank Charles in 1988 which dicusses
options for UEA.
and a DECNET supplement.
After much national and local effort the pressure from users to join the USA IP network became impossible
to resist and the rest as they say is history. Part of the attraction was ease of use especially with email address
formats ( john.doe@uea.ac.uk for example in place of a very user unfriendly X.400 string
"G=John/S=Doe/O=UEA/PRMD=UK.AC/ADMD= /C=GB/" )
but the price was a very insecure SMTP mail protocol which was, and still is, a gift to spammers and the like.