BITNET
/bit'net/ [acronym Because It's Time NETwork] n.
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 is also notorious as the apparent home
of
BIFF.
