Bitnet

network which links academic institutions worldwide (Computers)

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.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.
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.bitnet was a pseudo-domain-style suffix used in the late 1980s when identifying a hostname not connected directly to the Internet but possibly reachable through inter-network gateways. In this case, it indicated that the hostname preceding it was reachable via the BITNET network. This was one of several apparent "top-level domains" that were not actually in the Internet root, but were sometimes used in addresses during the time when non-Internet networks remained in wide use. Of these, .arpa was the only one ever actually added to the Internet root, where it continues to exist in a redesignated purpose of "Address and Routing Parameter Area".
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BITNET, network which links academic institutions worldwide (Computers)

BITNET, network which links academic institutions worldwide (Computers)

<networking> /bit'net/ (Because It's Time NETwork) An academic and research computer network connecting approximately 2500 computers. BITNET provides interactive, electronic mail and file transfer services, using a store and forward protocol, based on IBM Network Job Entry protocols.
Bitnet-II encapsulates the Bitnet protocol within IP packets and depends on the Internet to route them. BITNET traffic and Internet traffic are exchanged via several gateway hosts.
BITNET is now operated by CREN.
BITNET is everybody's least favourite piece of the network. The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs, VAXen (with lobotomised communications hardware), and Prime Computer supermini computers. They 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 is also notorious as the apparent home of BIFF.
[Jargon File]
(2002-09-02)