12 Mar
2023
12 Mar
'23
3:47 a.m.
Columbia was the BITNET/Internet/CCnet gateway for the first third of
the 1980's. I was the systems programmer who maintained the 20's IBM
RJE entry software (IBMSPL) as well as the DN60 (PDP-11) front end HASP
and bi-sync drivers, one of the reasons being that I knew 360 assembler
and PDP-11 macro.
At the time, I believe BITNET had some absurd number of IBM 'hosts'; I
recall the number being something like 12,000. Whatever it was, it was
eye popping. I think it was world-wide.
This was pre-SNA/LU 6.2, by the way, so they all looked like RJE
workstations and communicated by 'punching' decks of cards to each
other. So there were no interactive services, but a large amount of
work was done via batch (still is via TSO), so most of the time you
didn't notice any real difference.
Personally, I vastly preferred editing my JCL with Emacs instead of
Xedit. If it were a choice between TECO and Xedit, it depended on what
kind of mood I was in.
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On 3/11/23 9:32 PM, Robert Armstrong wrote:
How big was BITNET? When I was at DEC Easynet had around 5000 nodes. I heard that
it topped out at somewhere around 50,000 in the early 90s, but that was after my time.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Thomas DeBellis<tommytimesharing(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The thing that was gigantic was BITNET, back in the day.