transcription, транскрипция: [ /bit'net/ n., obs. ]
[acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see the network ) - until AOL happened. The BITNET hosts were 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 . By 1995 it had, much to everyone's relief, been obsolesced and absorbed into the Internet. Unfortunately, around this time we also got AOL.