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BITNET

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BITNET was a cooperative U.S. university network founded in 1981 under the aegis of Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at Yale University. The first network link was between CUNY and Yale.

The requirements for a college or university to join BITNET were simple:

  • Lease a data circuit (phone line) from your site to an existing BITNET node.
  • Buy modems for each end of the data circuit, sending one to the connecting point site.
  • Allow other institutions to connect to your site without chargeback.

From a technical point of view, BITNET differed from the Internet in that it was a point-to-point "store and forward" network. That is, e-mail messages and files were transmitted in their entirety from one server to the next until reaching their destination. From this perspective, BITNET was more like Usenet.

BITNET came to mean "Because It's Time Network", although the original meaning was "Because It's There Network".

Bitnet's NJE (Network Job Entry) network protocols, called RSCS, were used for the huge IBM internal network known as VNET. BITNET links originally ran at 9600 baud. The BITNET protocols were eventually ported to non-IBM mainframe operating systems, and became particularly widely implemented under VAX/VMS in addition to DECnet.

At its zenith around 1991, BITNET extended to almost 500 organizations and 3,000 nodes, all educational institutions. It spanned North America (in Canada it was known as NetNorth), Europe (as EARN) and some Persian Gulf states (as GulfNet). With the advent of TCP/IP systems and the Internet in the early 1990s, BITNET's popularity and use diminished quickly. Gateways existed on the ARPAnet and growing Internet to exchange email with Bitnet.

The non-profit, educational policies, however well intended, limited exchange with commercial entities, including IBM itself when it came to assistance and software bug fixes. This became a particular problem in heterogeneous networks when trying to communicate assistance with graphical workstation vendors like SGI.

BITNET featured e-mail and the LISTSERV software, but predated the World Wide Web, FTP and [(protocol)|Gopher]. It also supported interactive sending of files and messages to other users. The Interchat Relay Network, popularly known as Bitnet Relay, was created with the network's instant messaging feature. BITNET's first electronic magazine, VM/COM, began as a University of Maine newsletter and surfaced broadly in early 1984. Two email newsletters that began as Bitnet newsletters in the fall of 1987 are known to still be transmitting. They are the Electronic Air and SCUP Email News, formerly SCUP Bitnet News.

In 1984 a text-based BITNET game called MAD became the first global Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). Players connected from the USA, Europe or Israel to the unique server running in France.

In 1996, CREN ended their support for Bitnet. The individual nodes were free to keep their phone lines up as long as they felt like it, but as nodes dropped out the network splintered into parts that were inaccessible from one another. As of 2007, BITNET has essentially ceased operation. However, a succesor, BITNET II, which transmits information via the Internet using BITNET protocols, still has some users.

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Last updated on Thursday January 31, 2008 at 19:26:56 PST (GMT -0800)
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