The International Packet Switched Service (IPSS) was created in 1978 by a collaboration between the United Kingdom's General Post Office, Western Union

Western Union

The Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. Up until 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S...

 International and the United States' Tymnet

Tymnet

Tymnet was an international data communications network headquartered in San Jose, California that used virtual call packet switched technology and X.25, SNA/SDLC, ASCII and BSC interfaces to connect host computers at thousands of large companies, educational institutions, and government agencies....

.

This network grew from Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 and the USA to cover Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

, Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...

 and Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 by 1981, and by the 1990s it provided a worldwide networking infrastructure.

Companies and individual users could connect in to the network, via a PSS (Packet Switch Stream

Packet Switch Stream

In the United Kingdom, Packet Switch Stream was an X.25-based packet-switched network, provided by the British Post Office Telecommunications and then British Telecom starting in 1980...

) modem

Modem

A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

, or an X.25

X.25

X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...

 PAD (Packet Assembler/Disassembler

Packet Assembler/Disassembler

A packet assembler/disassembler, abbreviated PAD is a communications device which provides multiple asynchronous terminal connectivity to an X.25 network or host computer. It collects data from a group of terminals and places the data into X.25 packets...

), and a dedicated PSS line, and use it to connect to a variety of online databases and mainframe systems. There was a choice of about three different speeds of PSS lines, although a faster line was more costly to rent.