, Up:
BITNET /bit'net/ n., obs.
[acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see [the network]) - until AOL happened. The BITNET hosts were a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate using 80-character [EBCDIC] card images (see [eighty-column mind]); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/[RFC]-822 world with annoying regularity. BITNET was also notorious as the apparent home of [B1FF]. By 1995 it had, much to everyone's relief, been obsolesced and absorbed into the Internet. Unfortunately, around this time we also got AOL.
Node:
, Next:
, Previous: