Banyan VINES (for Virtual Integrated NEtwork Service) is a computer network operating system and the set of computer network protocols it uses to talk to client machines on the network. The Banyan company based the VINES operating system on Unix, and the network protocols on the archetypical Xerox XNS stack. VINES formed one of a group of XNS-based systems which also included Novell NetWare and ARCNET; like most of these earlier products, it has since disappeared from the market, Banyan along with it. A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ... A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... In networking, a communications protocol or network protocol is the specification of a set of rules for a particular type of communication. ... Banyan is an old-time networking company which around the 1980s produced VINES, a network protocol and set of utilities. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Unix-like. ... Xerox network services (XNS) is a protocol stack which provided routing and packet delivery developed by Xerox at Xerox PARC in the later 1970s and early 1980s. ... NetWare is a network operating system and the set of network protocols it uses to talk to client machines on the network. ... ARCNET (also camel cased as ARCnet, an acronym from Attached Resource Computer NETwork) is a local area network (LAN) protocol, similar in purpose to Ethernet or Token Ring. ... Banyan is an old-time networking company which around the 1980s produced VINES, a network protocol and set of utilities. ...

James Allchin, now Group Vice President for Platforms at Microsoft Corporation, worked as the chief architect of Banyan VINES. James Edward Allchin (born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1951) is Group Vice President of the Platform Group at Microsoft, responsible for the Windows platform and streaming media. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT), (founded 1975), headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA, is the worlds largest software company (with over 50,000 employees in various countries, as of May 2004). ...

VINES ran on a low-level protocol known as VIP, the VINES Internetwork Protocol: essentially identical to the lower layers of XNS. Addresses consisted of a 32-bit address and a 16-bit subnet, which mapped onto the 48-bit Ethernet address in order to route to machines. This meant that, like other XNS-based systems, VINES could only support a two-level internet. Ethernet (this name comes from the physical concept of ether) is a frame-based computer networking technology for local area networks (LANs). ...

However, a set of routing algorithms set VINES apart from other XNS systems at this level. The key differentiator, ARP (Address Resolution Protocol), allowed VINES clients to automatically set up their own network addresses. When a client first booted up it broadcast a request on the subnet asking for servers, which would respond with suggested addresses. The client would use the first to respond, although the servers could hand off "better" routing instructions to the client if the network changed. The overall concept very much resembled AppleTalk's NBP system, with the exception that VINES required at least one server, whereas NBP functioned completely "headlessly". Like NBP, VINES required an inherently "chatty" network, sending updates about the status of clients to other servers on the internetwork. This article discusses routing in computer networks. ... AppleTalk is a suite of protocols developed by Apple Computer for computer networking. ... This article is about the Internet An internet is a more general term for any set of interconnected computer networks that are connected by internetworking Graphic representation of the WWW information network structure around Wikipedia, as represented by hyperlinks The Internet, or simply the Net, is the publicly available worldwide...

Rounding out its lower-level system, VINES used RTP (the Routing Table Protocol), a low-overhead message system for passing around information about changes to the routing, and ARP to determine the address of other nodes on the system. These closely resembled the similar systems used in other XNS-based protocols. VINES also included ICP (the Internet Control Protocol), which it used to pass error-messages and metrics.

At the middle layer level, VINES used fairly standard software. The unreliable datagram service and data-stream service operated essentially identically to UDP and TCP on top of IP. However VINES also added a reliable message service as well, a sort of hybrid of the two that offered guaranteed delivery of a single packet. Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Token ring, FDDI, PPP RS-232, EIA-422, RS-449, EIA-485, 10BASE2, 10BASE-T... The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. ... The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the core protocols of the Internet protocol suite. ... The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ...

At the topmost layer, VINES provided the standard file and print services, as well as the unique StreetTalk, likely the first truly practical globally-consistent name-service for an entire internetwork. Using a globally distributed, partially replicated database, StreetTalk could meld multiple widely-separated networks into a single network that allowed seamless resource-sharing. It accomplished this through its rigidly hierarchical naming-scheme; entries in the directory always had the form local@group@organization. This applied to user accounts as well as to resources like printers and network shares. A name server is computer server software that implements a name service protocol. ...

VINES client-software ran on most PC-based operating systems, including MS-DOS and earlier versions of Microsoft Windows. It was fairly light-weight on the client, and hence remained in use during the later half of the 1990s, when many machines not up to the task of running other networking stacks remained in widespread use. This occurred on the server side as well. Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... Microsoft Windows is a range of operating environments for personal computers and servers. ...

By the late 1990s this performance edge became irrelevant (and in fact disappeared, as VINES could use a maximum of only 96 MB of RAM and a single processor due to its aging SVR3 underpinings, preventing it from taking advantage of newer hardware), and VINES sales rapidly dried up. Banyan increasingly turned to StreetTalk as a differentiator, eventually porting it to Windows NT as a stand-alone product, and offering it as an interface to LDAP systems. This never really took off in the market, and by this point Novell had a similar offering. This article is about a unit of data measurement. ... This article is about the animal, sheep; for other meanings of Sheep, see Sheep (disambiguation). ... The many divergents of System V System V, previously known as AT&T System V, was one of the versions of the Unix computer operating system. ... Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, and was succeeded by Windows 2000 (still based on Windows NT). ... Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is a protocol for accessing on-line directory services. ... Novell, Inc. ...

Banyan eventually re-formed in 1999 as ePresence, a general Internet services company. This didn't fare very well either, and after a series of failed ventures it finally sold its services division to Unisys in late 2003 and liquidated its remaining holdings in their Switchboard.com subsidiary. Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) is a provider of information technology services and solutions with operations across the world. ...