From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

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 were used for the huge IBM internal network known as VNET, which was larger than other networks such as ARPAnet for quite a while. 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.

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.

BITNET featured e-mail and the LISTSERV software, but predated the World Wide Web, FTP and 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.

In 1984 a text-based (or, more accurately, roguelike) game called MAD became the first global massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) operating through BITNET from Israel via the USA to Europe.

• History of the Internet

• A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv, 1985–1991
• Living Internet - BITNET
• NetHistory - Archive of BITNET newsletters and stories