BITNET, n. : Oxford English Dictionary (original) (raw)

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Forms: 19– BITNET, 19– Bitnet. (Show More)

Etymology: < BIT, acronym < the initial letters of ‘b ecause i t's t here’ (later, ‘b ecause i t's t ime’: see note), in punning allusion to bit n.4 + -net comb. form.

First used in a letter from Ira Fuchs, founder of the network, to the original 34 universities invited to join in May, 1981.

‘Greydon Freeman and I created bitnet in 1981 and deliberately constructed the name as a play on the double use of the letters “ bit”. We originally thought that “ bit” would stand for “Because It's There” and subsequently decided (before the Perspectives article [see quot. 19831 ] was written by me) to change the meaning of the “ bit” acronym to be “Because It's Time”.’ (Ira Fuchs, in correspondence to the OED, 29 Aug. 2001).

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Computing and Telecomm.

An electronic communication network founded in 1981 to link academic institutions, initially in North America and then more widely, and to interconnect with other information networks.A proprietary name in the United States. bitnet uses a communications protocol of a ‘store-and-forward’ type, whereby information sent from a computer connected to the network is received by an intermediate node before being forwarded to its destination.

1981 Edunet News Winter 7/1 In March of 1981, the City University of New York sent a letter to 50 universities in the east to find out if they were interested in cooperating in the formation of a new network of university computer centers... The response..resulted in the creation of bitnet.

1983 I. H. Fuchs in Perspectives in Computing Mar. 17/1 It is anticipated that within a few years, bitnet will encompass most major universities in the United States and Canada.

1988 Network World (Nexis) 18 Apr. 17 The goal of the project is to make bitnet more compatible with tcp/ip based research networks already in place across the U.S. and Europe.

1991 Profession (Mod. Lang. Assoc. Amer.) 42/2 bitnet offers direct connections to listserv—a program that stores files for the network and distributes them over it.

1994 Internet World July 15/4 Resources on the major global networks, including the Internet, Usenet, bitnet, Fidonet, CompuServe, and others.

2000 World & I (Nexis) 1 May 289 At its peak in 1991 and '92, the bitnet consisted of approximately fourteen hundred organizations in forty-nine countries.

1981—2000(Hide quotations)