Hi Bill and Dave, I have fond memories of BITNET in a university environment in the early 1990s on VM/CMS and on VAX/VMS.
Some years ago, I went searching on the web for information about it and found almost nothing. It was as if it had been erased from history. I did find a single website which contained lots of BITNET user nostalgia but it has since disappeared. I managed to pull some parts of it from archive.org with a view to putting it back together eventually. I have had no success contacting the owner. After a lot of digging, I managed to locate someone who once worked in EARN (the European arm of BITNET) who had a long forgotten backup of the BITNET/EARN network definition files which he was willing to share with me. I haven't quite figured out how to share these with the rest of the world yet as they are full of email addresses, some of which may still be valid. While the original BITNET was NJE over bisync lines, the second generation of BITNET also allowed the use of NJE over TCP/IP while maintaining compatibility with NJE over bisync. The Hercules bi-sync over IP implementation is not suitable for sending over the internet as it produces vast amounts of traffic when idle and cannot cope with latency of more than a couple of seconds nor interruptions of any kind. Neither is it compatible with the NJE over TCP/IP used for BITNET-II. I have written a patch for Hercules which allows it to present what looks like a bisync line on the inside and to speak BITNET-II compatible NJE over TCP/IP on the outside. I have also patched the RSCS that comes with the publically available VM/370 to be able to speak NJE. Like most of my projects, these are very close to completion but hung up on some minor snag near the end. At the moment, this setup is able to communicate over the internet with RSCS on VM/ESA running on a P/390 machine and should be capable of talking to anything else that could have connected to BITNET-II. Software such as MAILER and MAILBOOK still exists in much updated form but will not run on VM/370. I have asked the current maintainers to see if they can dig up very old versions which would be easier to press into service on VM/370 but they have not been successful. The chances of someone finding an old backup are probably diminishing rapidly. The software most commonly used for BITNET on VAX and Alpha VMS is called JNET. A few years ago, I approached the then owner to see if they would license it for hobbyist use in a manner similar to the VMS hobbyist license. Unfortunately they would not. There is some relatively freely available software for NJE on VMS and unix called HUJI-NJE. It is not as capable or polished as JNET but it is workable. I have made some tweaks to this to make it work on modern versions of VAX and Alpha VMS but see note above on completion of projects. HUJI-NJE also inspired a unix-only enhanced version possibly called FUNET-NJE which was used to great effect on EARN/BITNET in Finland. As far as I know, this version is freely available. As far as I recall, there is some confusion over names and versions. Back in the day, I remember BITNET for unix software called UREP. I have no direct experience of it but I recall that interaction with it from other BITNET nodes was pretty awful. I have not managed to find any trace of it in recent years - I think it was probably not free software. It is not necessary for SIMH to support synchronous connections in order to allow NJE over TCP/IP in and out. Regards, Peter Coghlan. Hi Bill, That's a complex topic. Basically, a BitNet connection was an IBM RSCS link..., At the low levels that's BiSync. Real BiSync hardware is rare(ish) but the Hercules Mainframe emulator does support bi-sync over IP so physically its possible. At the networking level, whilst the original RSCS code is available its an early version and its missing key features needed for Bitnet. Also the freely available versions of VM/CMS on which RSCS runs don't have the E-Mail software used to send messages. Later versions that would work are still licenced materials of IBM. I think the same goes for the VAX software. As it could possibly still be used commercially to connect to current mainframes it does not appear to be freely available. I am also not sure how you would connect it to a mainframe, as I don't believe SIMH supports synchronous connections. Dave > -----Original Message----- > From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Bill > Gunshannon via cctalk > Sent: 16 September 2017 01:16 > To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> > Subject: BitNET (Was: RE: RIP Jerry Pournelle - Firsts) > > > ________________________________________ > > While all this talk of the ARPANet is cool and brings back some fine > memories, what about BitNET? Anyone here remember it? > Any chance someone has a copy of the source for a BitNET Node? > I have seen UUCPNet and DECNet revived. It might be fun to bring BitNET > back up for sentimental reasons. > > bill
