What Does BITNET Mean?
BITNET was a wide-area cooperative computer network made up of networks from different universities in the US. It was established in 1981 by the City University of New York’s (CUNY) Ira Fuchs and Greydon Freeman from Yale University, with the first network link being between these two universities. Its name was originally taken from the phrase “Because It’s There Net,” but later changed to “Because It’s Time Net.”
Techopedia Explains BITNET
BITNET was a point-to-point store and forward kind of network, very different from the way Internet Protocol (IP) works. This means that in BITNET, email and files were transmitted as whole data from one server to another until it reached the final destination, making it more like Usenet. BITNET used the RSCS protocol for network job entry (NJE), which was also used for the huge internal IBM network called VNET. When the protocols used by BITNET were ported to non-IBM mainframe OS’s, it became popular and widely implemented in VAX/VMS.
