‘X.25 is a living network. There’ll be no end to improving the product.’

As part of a sporadic effort to stay abreast of what is new in high technology and the evolving society of the high-tech workplace, I called the other day on the leader of a team of people who are working to make it easier for computers to talk to one another.

Tim Tuttle, a quiet man with a self-effacing smile, is the director of a project at Micom Systems in Simi Valley that keeps about 50 people out in the distant reaches of X.25.

For the benefit of those who haven’t yet heard of this up-and-coming form of computer communication, X.25 is pronounced “X Dot Twenty-Five.”

To add anything else intelligent to the subject gets a little sticky.

Tuttle, who unfortunately does not have to expend a great deal of his creative energy explaining the essence of X.25 to the non-technical, described it over the phone as a packet-switching network.

A packet, he said, is a block of computer data--lots of little bits of electronic information, like the number and amount of a check or the name and date of birth of a felon.

A network is something like a telephone exchange. It requires a protocol, which provides the coded rules of the road that allow the bank record and the police record to zip through the exchange without crashing into each other.

Right now, Tuttle said, Europeans are better versed in X.25 than Americans because their close-knit community of nations needed standard data exchange between government agencies and businesses over a common network.

Here, Tuttle said, data networks have been built up company by company and agency by agency, using myriad protocols.

Micom, however, sees a growing need for existing computer networks and new ones to meet up and exchange data on a nationwide medium.

The company hopes to make X.25 that medium.

Some concepts just don’t come across over the phone. So I went to see Tuttle, also wanting to see what it looks like inside a company that is helping to lay the foundation for the worldwide exchange of banking records and crime reports.

Micom’s Simi Valley facility, which opened two years ago, is one of those massive, single-story blocks of buildings popping up like islands, each surrounded by a sea of parked cars, on the periphery of the Valley.

Summoned from deep within to the reception desk, Tuttle led me through a maze of wide, gray corridors.

Micom, which started with only a handful of workers in a small Valley plant in 1973, has retained an egalitarian flavor in the new plant, where 800 people now work. The executive suite gave way to the technicians’ quarters with no change of decor--steady gray walls with plum-colored doors.

Yet the architecture revealed a monastic approach to work instead of the wide-open, communal style found in many modern offices.

Tuttle’s own office stood at the end of a narrower inner hall with four or five cubicles on either side. Each cubicle belonged to a programmer working on the X.25 project.

Settled into his office, Tuttle took a crack at explaining what the programmers were up to.

“X.25 is a living network,” Tuttle said. “There will be no end to improving the product.”

Every four years, he said, the international X.25 governing body meets in Switzerland to review changes in the worldwide scope of data communications and write new specifications to keep the protocol in step.

Right now, he said, it is working on new specifications to improve the way X.25 works over satellite.

It also is designing a new version of the program to make X.25 work on IBM computers, which come with their own communications protocol, Tuttle said.

The programming department, he said, is only a small part of the X.25 team, which also has technical writers, product managers and a marketing staff.

The program itself isn’t what Micom sells. What Micom actually markets is a small box full of computer equipment.

Tuttle called it the “low-end” box. It attaches to a small network of computers and connects them to the world.

The program goes inside the box in the form of a small plastic module that Micom calls the “Feature Pack.”

Each kind of computer gets its own feature pack that translates its protocols into to those of X.25.

A couple of times our flights of pure thought were interrupted when the room’s fluorescent lights flickered and a small white pad on the wall started to spit like a cat.

Tuttle would frown back at it.

He said the pad is an electronic motion detector that automatically turns off his lights a few minutes after he leaves the room. If he sits too still, it gets confused and turns on and off.

That was a technology I could relate to better, I’m afraid, than I ever will to X.25.

Though he tried to stick to general, highly glossed-over descriptions, Tuttle at times was unable to cross the gap of understanding and lapsed into the terms of his trade.

When trying to describe the potential for X.25 in this country, he pointed out earnestly that there are 6 million BSC 3270s in this country right now.

I have no idea what they are. But I’m sure each one would be better with a Feature Pack.