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.
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@gmail.com> wrote: The thing that was gigantic was BITNET, back in the day.