[1] The more widespread was a set of computer communication packet-based protocols intended to connect the then-recently developed and very popular (within MIT) Lisp machines; the second was one of the earliest local area network (LAN) hardware implementations.
Chaosnet's network topology was usually series of linear (not circular) cables, each up to a maximum of a kilometer and roughly 12 clients.
The individual segments were interconnected by "bridges" (much in the ARPANET mold), generally older computers like PDP-11s with two network interfaces.
[7]: §3.6 BIND uses a built-in pseudo-top-level-domain in the "CHAOS class" for retrieving information about a running DNS server.
The packet contents could be treated as bytes of 8 or 16 bits, with support for other word sizes provided by higher-level protocols.
Symbolics, a maker of the Lisp machines, licensed the MIT Chaosnet hardware and software implementation from the CADR computer design.