PSS didn’t use JANET as a core, we were interconnected, but PSS was a network in its own right. We used switches from Telenet in Virginia, the TP4000s, the CPU was a 6502 with a massive 128k of paged RAM. The PSS tariff was quite a complex one. There was rental on the circuit, then as X.25 was a call (SVC) based protocol, each call was charged to the originator based on the amount of data transferred by both parties, with a minimum tariff per call.
I retired last week, and a friend gave me the notes from the X.25 training course he’d been in when he started, I had a quick read through and could recognise the sections I’d written by the verbose sentences with lots of commas.
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IIUC a usb memory stick attached to a Naim streamer is generally considered as optimum for sound quality. Can it take a large ‘stick’, aka SSD, or any other USB drive attached direct?
Melco, Innuos and Uniti Core have rendering software and can feed a DAC direct, not using a network at all, connecting either by USB or SPDIF. I’m not sure how many people have tried - certainly some have and of those some have preferred the Network route. The reason is not known - different renderer, but also the USB connection itself might be a better path for RF that the receiving device has to cope with.
Melco offers a direct ethernet connection (i.e. not a network). From the limited observations I have read that seems to give better sound quality than either via a network or USB. That is unsurprising as the path is shorter and simpler, with nothing ekse attached to it (and so only one cable to worry about!).
Personally Ido like the store and renderer combined, feeding DAC vire a short dedicated cable, with nothing else to worry about.
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In theory you are right, but in practice there are important differences between a standard NAS and an RPi + USB drive combination:
If a Qnap or a Synology NAS has an hardware failure, you are first in troubles. If the same happens to an RPi, you just pick up a new RPi from the drawer, copy the backup image of the original RPi on a fresh micro SD card and you are done. It’s a 5 minutes job.
If Qnap or Synology decide that they will not support your preferred UPnP server any longer, you are in troubles. If you use an RPi, this will not happen.
If you use a Qnap or a Synology you most likely will try to place them as far as you can from your HiFi gears and from your DAC. At replay time, files have to be transferred from the NAS to your streamer over your LAN. If you use an RPi, you can place it wherever you want. In particular, you can place it near your DAC and avoid any data transfer over your LAN (wired or wireless) at replay time.
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Playing devil’s advocate here, if the person who set up the RPi popped their cloggs, any remaining music fans in the premises may be in troubles when something goes wrong!
This was more pronounced on the earlier streamers, less so now.
However cloud streaming tends to use FLAC, where as many locally stream WAV, which can make a signature change.
Now I discovered with the legacy streamers, the SQ was quite affected by the inter frame timing consistency of the media stream burstsas well as how hard the TCP flow control engine works.. which for cloud streaming is not good.. however put a proxy server in the path that transcodes .. and has the same local interframe timing consistency as your local media server.. then voila it sounds the same.
Now with the new streamers they support Roon, which acts as a media aggregator, transcoder and proxy, and you find there is no difference between local and cloud media whether it be from a local or remote NAS… because as far as the streamer is concerned it appears the same in the RAAT stream.
Finally streaming then comes of age… with Naim.. the physical location of the media now doesn’t need to determine how well it sounds… once you get to this point you find you use your NAS less and less as I have discovered… at last 
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Ok, I don’t understand some of that but I’m under the impression USB is generally a noisy input comparatively.
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Thanks Simon.
So Roon is a proxy server that raises the web streamed files to the same level of SQ as the locally streamed ones.
Pesumably also any upnp server like Bubble?
Or Audirvana?
Also any Naim, Melco or Innuous server too - if it is in the chain from your ISP router to your DAC?
So that’s another reason why a Roon Nucleus would improve SQ of streamed files?
I’d really like to bypass the NAS stage altogether.
The cost of building a hi res files library plus a posh NAS is too much.
I’d rather spend the budget on upgrading my Naim gear.
Correct… a media aggregator or media stream proxy is what you need… it makes the Ethernet flow dynamic consistent between local or remotely sourced streams…
And increasingly PCM media is available in higher resolution than is possible from CD
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For me it is a simple way to fill up a unused part of the allocated 1TB space from my Office 365 subscription. I uploaded music files in the FLAC format and it works quite well when needed.
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Same here although but I use mine as a backup location only. You can also use OneDrive as a source in BubbleUPnP.
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A Naim server only serves locally stored music files, so it has nothing to do with Tidal, Qobuz etc. Innuos servers, perhaps, as they have native Tidal support or Roon.
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Fair enough. But the person who sets up the RPi can always leave 3 or four copies of the micro SD card of the original RPi. The remaining music fans then only need to drop one of these cards into a new RPi and the party goes on! No need to call the beyond, let apart a Qnap or Synology hotline.
I rejoiced when the IEEE serial link to my hard drive was replaced with a Centonics parallel one. Still any hard drive was luxury compared with punch cards.
And whatever happened to Fortran?
Networking? So what was best: Econet, AppleTalk, Netware or Banyan Vines?
I’ve got a FORTRAN program on paper tape. I’m blowed if I can remember what it is though. 
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Netware was the one that I used - except for one project I worked on at a company called Linotype-Paul, where we were using a Cambridge Ring topography developed in-house.
As for IEEE or Centronics - mostly SCSI for the serious stuff.
Fortran I used in my postgrad work for my PhD - mostly doing statistical analysis and plotting species profiles of beaches. Later COBOL (spit), then Modula and so on up to .NET
Basic was what we had to learn in the early 80’s. Fortran was for the much more advanced computer types. I remember doing all my flow diagrams in retrospect - after I’d written the code.
Hated It!
G
That’s the only way to ensure that the documentation is correct. Well-known technique. Saves a lot of time and effort if you write the documentation after writing the code.
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Did you ever use GenStat? I used that in part of a my biomedical statistics masters dissertation. I used to type my programs on to cards which were processed at Rothamsted Experimental Station. It is where I first encountered Fortran.
I just found it easier.
G
Arrrrh, wonderful to read all this. A real trip down memory lane. I’ve shed 40 years and have my hair back 
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