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by larsbrinkhoff 4 days ago
Chaosnet was inspired by the experimental 3 Mbits/s Ethernet in use at Xerox PARC at the time. Experimental Ethernet has a 8-bit node address; Chaosnet has 16 bits, of which 8 is network and another 8 is the node. The Chaosnet data rate is 4 Mbits/s.

On top of the hardware protocol, Chaosnet also defined the higher-level transport and session layer protocol. Applications are addressed by a name string rather than a port number; e.g. "TELNET" instead of 23. This protocol was retained when the NIC hardware was replaced with stock Ethernet.