Archive

My library was dukedom large enough. 
                     - Prospero in Shakespeare's "The Tempest"

Cultural anthropologists can learn a lot about an ancient culture just by examining the artifacts that the culture left behind. Likewise, we can try to understand what it was like in the old character-mode days of BITNET and the Internet just by reading what the people there felt was important enough to write down... er... type.

Many thanks to Ornoth D.A. Liscomb for providing the archives of NutWorks and VM/COM. If you have early BITNET/Internet newsletters or other interesting documents that you feel should be added to the Archive, send mail to chris@condon.net.

Index

 

The VM/COM Archives

When people start communicating using a new medium, they usually begin by emulating a medium they already know (hence terms like "electronic mail"). VM/COM was BITNETs first electronic magazine. It started as a local University of Maine user newsletter, and grew into an eclectic network magazine featuring news, humor, editorials, and network tips. I wrote columns for the last three issues of VM/COM, and it inspired me to try my hand at the electronic magazine format with NetMonth.

 

The NetMonth Archives

NetMonth was an online BITNET newsmagazine that I started and edited. You can read more about how and why it came to be on the Voices page.

These are the 38 issues of NetMonth I edited as they originally appeared. This means that they are complete with the original typos, misspellings, and other mistakes. They are artifacts of network history now, so I feel that I should leave them "as is." Note that some of these are quite large due to my fascination at the time with justified text and ASCII graphics.

These are the issues of NetMonth produced after Philip Baczewski took over the NetMonth editorial duties:

 

The NetWeek Archives

NetWeek was an experiment I tried in 1988 in order to send out new BITNET information more quickly. It didn't work.

 

BITNET USERHELP and BITNET SERVERS

BITNET SERVERS was the successor to the original BITLIST -- a list of BITNET servers and services.

BITNET USERHELP was a document I wrote to give new BITNET users a quick tutorial on how to use the network. It was updated several times, and was reprinted by many universities as part of their official BITNET documentation for students and faculty. (I recall that University of Dayton mailed me the issues of the newsletters in which they reprinted it). I think the biggest treat I got was when Yoshinori Hayakawa mailed me his translation of the document into Japanese for Tohoku University in Japan. As an inside joke, I sprinkled references to my nieces and nephews throughout USERHELP (look for Daniel, Rebecca, and Kristen). No, I didn't forget Matthew and Ben... they weren't born yet!

 

FSFNET and DargonZine

DargonZine (originally known as FSFNet) was first published in 1985. Between FSFnet and DargonZine, it is the longest-running electronic magazine on the Internet. DargonZine prints original medieval fantasy stories written by aspiring Internet writers. It is the publication vehicle of the Dargon Project, a collaborative writing group where authors write in a common milieu, sharing settings and characters. The project was founded to allow aspiring writers on the Internet to meet and become better writers through mutual contact and collaboration. DargonZine only prints stories which take place in this setting.

 

The Nutworks Archives

NutWorks was a humor magazine edited by Brent C.J. Britton of the University of Maine and Leonard M. Friedman of City University of New York. It's a great example of how people on the 'net would come together for a common cause -- in this case, to bust a gut.

 

The BITNET Network

BITNET was started in 1981 with a link between Yale University and the City University of New York. While BITNET users can send and receive Internet mail, it is not part of the Internet itself (although many BITNET sites are on both networks). Internet users are probably most familiar with BITNET through LISTSERV, the mailing list server that originated in BITNET and is now used widely on the Internet.

A BITNET overview provided by the BITNET Network Information Center.

The BITNET Charter was written in 1986.

 

The Chats and the Relay Conferencing System

The Chats were conferencing systems where an individual could send an real-time interactive message to a userid on a remote system, which would rebroadcast those messages to other users who were signed on. (See BITNET USERHELP for a better explanation). They were similar in usage to the CB Simulator on CompuServe (and the later America Online People Connection and the Internet's Internet Relay Chat). Because interactive messages in BITNET took precedence over mail or file traffic, these servers had a tendency to slow down the network. This caused a great deal of controversy over how the network should be used, and how this traffic could be controlled.

Chat Politics - The original letter by Henry Nussbacher that started the Chat controversy, and some responses. This all happened when I first became interested in BITNET. I didn't understand all of the issues involved and I send Henry a rather angry note (to which he replied -- and set me straight). Thankfully, that note has long since been deleted.

Chat Analysis - Henry Nussbacher wrote Chat Analysis to illustrate how the early conference machines were bringing BITNET to its knees. His analysis inspired others to write a more efficient linked conference machine system known as Relay.

Relay History - A great article by Jeff Kell from 1987 about how and why Relay was developed. 

 

The Gliding Byte Archives

The Gliding Byte was the second in a series of serial novels-a-clef that blossomed on BITNET during the 1980s. For the story behind it, see Barry D. Gates' Behind The Gliding Byte in the Voices section.

 

The Environment Account Archives

The Environment Account is another of the serial novels-a-clef from BITNET in the the 1980s.

 

The BITLIST Archives

BITLIST is where it all began for me in BITNET. File this one under "falling into it." I was eager to find out about what servers and services were available in BITNET, but there was no single source of information. In July of 1985 I put together a list of the servers of which I knew and sent it out to some network friends, with a request to let me know of anything which should be added to it.

The rest, as they say, is history. More and more people subscribed. BITLIST became the official list of servers and servers, if only because it was the only list. After a while I began adding comments or editorials to the bottom of BITLIST. Fifty-seven weekly issues later, I split the list of servers and editorials into the monthly NetMonth and BITNET SERVERS publications.