BITNET was a co-operative

U.S. The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

university computer network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the

City University of New York The City University of New York (CUNY, pronounced , ) is the Public university, public university system of Education in New York City, New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 25 campuses: eleven ...

(CUNY) and Greydon Freeman at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

. The first network link was between CUNY and Yale.

Background

The name BITNET originally meant "Because It's There Network", but it eventually came to mean "Because It's Time Network". A college or university wishing to join BITNET was required to lease a data circuit from a site to an existing BITNET

node In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics * Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two or more curves, lines ...

, buy

modem The Democratic Movement (, ; MoDem ) is a centre to centre-right political party in France, whose main ideological trends are liberalism and Christian democracy, and that is characterised by a strong pro-Europeanist stance. MoDem was establis ...

s for each end of the data circuit, sending one to the connecting point site, and allow other institutions to connect to its site free of charge. In the early 1980s, the

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

(NSF) had several initiatives running to help spread the benefits of networking. One of these efforts was called

CSNET The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be ...

, and it linked together several computer science departments across the country using TCP/IP. Another was a network of regional computer networks that linked up universities in different parts of the country. In 1981, universities came together to form BITNET, which allowed thousands of new users to experience innovations such as email and file transfers for the first time. All of these new networks showed the possibilities of computer networks and helped stoke demand for a robust nationwide network like NSFNET. BITNET’s first electronic magazine, VM/COM, began as a

University of Maine The University of Maine (UMaine) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Orono, Maine, United States. It was established in 1865 as the land-grant college of Maine and is the Flagship universitie ...

newsletter and circulated 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). IBM gave BITNET a $2 million grant over three years during the mid-1980s. BITNET's eligibility requirements limited exchange with commercial entities, including IBM itself, which made technical assistance and bug fixes difficult. This became a particular problem when trying to communicate on heterogeneous networks with graphical workstation vendors such as

Silicon Graphics Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...

Technical details

BITNET, with Remote Spooling Communications Subsystem (RSCS) and the Network Job Entry (NJE)

network protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics, and synchronization of ...

, was used for the huge

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

internal network known as VNET. BITNET links originally ran at 9600 bit/s. The BITNET protocols were eventually ported to non-IBM

mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, and became particularly widely implemented under VAX/VMS, in addition to

DECnet DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC ...

. BITNET featured

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

and

LISTSERV The term Listserv (styled by the registered trademark licensee, L-Soft International, Inc., as LISTSERV) has been used to refer to electronic mailing list software applications in general, but is more properly applied to a few early instances of ...

software, but predated the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

, the common use of

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

, and

Gopher Pocket gophers, commonly referred to simply as gophers, are burrowing rodents of the family Geomyidae. The roughly 41 speciesSearch results for "Geomyidae" on thASM Mammal Diversity Database are all endemic to North and Central America. They ar ...

. Gateways for the lists made them available on

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

. BITNET also supported interactive transmission of files and messages to other users. A gateway service called TRICKLE enabled users to request files from Internet FTP servers in 64 Kb UUencoded chunks. The ''Interchat Relay Network'', popularly known as Bitnet Relay, was the network's

instant messaging Instant messaging (IM) technology is a type of synchronous computer-mediated communication involving the immediate ( real-time) transmission of messages between two or more parties over the Internet or another computer network. Originally involv ...

feature. BITNET differed from the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

in that it was a point-to-point "

store and forward Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node in ...

" network. That is,

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 UUCPNET.

Extent

BITNET connected about 400 universities and 1200 computers. 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), Israel (as ISRAEARN), India ( VIDYANET) and some

Persian Gulf The Persian Gulf, sometimes called the Arabian Gulf, is a Mediterranean seas, mediterranean sea in West Asia. The body of water is an extension of the Arabian Sea and the larger Indian Ocean located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.Un ...

states (as GulfNet). BITNET was also very popular in other parts of the world, especially in South America, where about 200 nodes were implemented and heavily used in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Part of the South African inter-university academic network, initially known as UNINET, and later TENET (Tertiary Education Network) was implemented using BITNET protocols in the late 1980s, with a TCP/IP gateway to the Internet via

Rhodes University Rhodes University () is a public research university located in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. It is one of four universities in the province. Established in 1904, Rhodes University is the prov ...

. With the rapid growth of

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

systems and the Internet in the early 1990s, and the rapid abandonment of the base IBM mainframe platform for academic purposes, BITNET's popularity and use diminished quickly.

Legacy

BITNET hosted its first

multi-user dungeon A multi-user dungeon (MUD, ), also known as a multi-user dimension or multi-user domain, is a Multiplayer video game, multiplayer Time-keeping systems in games#Real-time, real-time virtual world, usually Text-based game, text-based or storybo ...

(MUD) in 1984, the text-based MAD. Players connected from the United States, Europe or Israel to a single 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 wished, but as nodes dropped out, the network splintered into parts that were inaccessible from each other. As of 2007, BITNET has essentially ceased operation. However, a successor, BITNET II, which transmits information via the Internet using BITNET protocols, still has some users.

References

External links