[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.
he network n.
1. Historicaslly, the union of all the major
noncommercial academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as
Internet, the pre-1990 ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the
virtual UUCP and Usenet `networks', plus the corporate
in-house networks and commercial time-sharing services (such as
CompuServe, GEnie and AOL) that gateway to them....
etwork, the: n. 1. The union of all the major noncommercial
academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old
ARPANET, NSFnet, {BITNET}, and the virtual UUCP and {USENET}
`networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial
time-sharing services (such as CompuServe) that gateway to them....
