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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.
All times are GMT +1. The time now is 04:44 AM.
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