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BITNET
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BITNET /bit'net/ /n./ [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork]
Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see network,
the). The BITNET hosts are 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.
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