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.
