What is "bitnet"

n. An early North American academic computer network, supporting e-mail and listservs but pre-dating the World Wide Web.

BITNET was a co-operative U.S. university computer network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and Greydon Freeman, Inc. at Yale University. The first network link was between CUNY and Yale.

The name BITNET originally meant "Because It's There Network", but it eventually came to mean "Because It's Time Network".

A college or university wishing to join BITNET was required to a lease a data circuit ( phone line) from a site to an existing BITNET node, buy modems for each end of the data circuit, sending one to the connecting point site, and allow other institutions to connect to its site free of charge.