Was Honeywell-Bull Distributed System Architecture derived from Cyclades INRIA project ?
While Cyclades was developed in Roquencourt, at a walking distance from Louveciennes’s CII lab, the Cyclades experimental project initiated by Louis Pouzin did not evolve into CII’s NNA -the predecessor of DSA. CII designers were perfectly aware of Cyclades design, but they diverge from the Cyclades options that were rejected by standardization bodies in CCITT. PTTs and notably French PTT preferred the so-called “connection” protocols -closer to the Telex culture- to the “connection-less” datagram protocol that Pouzin had borrowed from Arpanet. After the fact, it may seem unhappy that this architecture choice made Honeywell moved away from what was the direction of Internet future standard. But, before deregulation, the PTT choices were unavoidable and DSA was following them. Note that PTT imposed the X-25 standard because it mapped well on the then sacrosanct Telex that emphasized end-to-end transmission control.
