Tymnet
Tymnet
Main page

Tymnet

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Tymnet

Tymnet was an international data communications network developed and operated by Tymshare. It was based at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California. The network used packet-switching techniques, including statistical multiplexing, and connected host computers at companies, educational institutions, and government agencies through synchronous leased lines and programmable terminal interfaces.

The business consisted of a large public network that supported dial-up users and a private network that allowed government agencies and large companies (mostly banks and airlines) to build their own dedicated networks. The private networks were often connected via gateways to the public network to reach locations not on the private network. Tymnet was also connected to dozens of international public gateways via Tymnet II protocol and other public networks in the United States and internationally via X.25/X.75 gateways.

As the Internet grew and became almost universally accessible in the late 1990s, the need for services such as Tymnet migrated to the Internet style connections, but still had some value in the Third World and for specific legacy roles. However the value of these links continued to decrease, and Tymnet shut down in 2004.

Tymnet offered local dial-up modem access in most cities in the United States and to a limited degree in Canada, which preferred its own DATAPAC service.

Users would dial into Tymnet and then interact with a simple command-line interface to establish a connection with a remote system. Once connected, data was passed to and from the user as if connected directly to a modem on the distant system.

Tymnet was extensively used by large companies to provide dial-up services for their employees who were "on the road", as well as a gateway for users to connect to large online services such as CompuServe or The Source.

In its original implementation, the network supervisor contained most of the routing intelligence in the network. Unlike the TCP/IP protocol underlying the internet, Tymnet used a circuit switching layout which allowed the supervisors to be aware of every possible end-point. In its original incarnation, the users connected to nodes built using Varian minicomputers, then entered commands that were passed to the supervisor which ran on a XDS 940 host.

Circuits were character oriented and the network was oriented towards interactive character-by-character full-duplex communications circuits. The nodes handled character translation between various character sets, which were numerous at that time. This did have the side effect of making data transfers quite difficult, as bytes from the file would be invisibly "translated" without specific intervention on the part of the user.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.