By 1978 a national network had been established at the then Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). This network linked the disparate campus "mainframes" around the country via PDP/11 and LSI/11 machines linked together over 9600bit/s "S2" circuits leased from the New Zealand Post Office. Due to the Telecommunications Act, the DSIR was not able to link all the research institutions together (MAF Research, the universities and other non-DSIR research institutions). However, by the mid-1980s, with the advent of the Post Office's X-25 based packet switching network, and a degree of de-regulation, it became possible to link the various institutions together at a cost. In 1985 and 1986 a number of meetings were held by the various research institutions to plan for a broad-based research network that would provide basic research electronic communication (mail, file sharing and remote access). It was agreed to base this on the UK's Joint Academic NETwork (JANET) "Blue Book" standard rather than the US's ARPANET standard.