Bitnet Relay Chat - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Bitnet
BITNET
BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...

Relay—officially The Interchat Relay Network, also known simply as Relay—was a precursor to today's Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat is a protocol for real-time Internet text messaging or synchronous conferencing. It is mainly designed for group communication in discussion forums, called channels, but also allows one-to-one communication via private message as well as chat and data transfer, including file...

and various online chat

Online chat

Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...

systems. It was developed by Jeff Kell (then at JEFF@UTCVM), of (University of Tennessee

University of Tennessee

The University of Tennessee is a public land-grant university headquartered at Knoxville, Tennessee, United States...

, Chattanooga) in 1985 in REXX

REXX

REXX is an interpreted programming language that was developed at IBM. It is a structured high-level programming language that was designed to be both easy to learn and easy to read...

.

Even before Relay was implemented, one could send an instant message

Instant messaging

Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

(called MSG) to someone on another computer if one knew the other person's userid (i.e., screen name or login) and the name of the remote computer system the person was logged into. This was a basic function of BITNET

BITNET

BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...

systems.

Relay was a chat service running on a special id on several suitable hosts in the Bitnet. To use it, one would send a MSG to a userid called RELAY. The Relay program running on that userid would then provide multi-user chat functions, primarily in form of "channels" (chat room

Chat room

The term chat room, or chatroom, is primarily used by mass media to describe any form of synchronous conferencing, occasionally even asynchronous conferencing...

s). The MSG could contain either a command for Relay (prefixed by the ever since popular "/" slash character command prefix) or a message for one or more real persons at a remote host (typically mainframe computer

Mainframe computer

Mainframes are powerful computers used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing.The term originally referred to the...

s).

The following is an example of a session:



/SIGNUP robert harper

 Thank you for signing up, robert harper.
 Now use the /SIGNON  command to
 establish a nickname and to logon Relay.




/SIGNON rob

Welcome to the Interchat Relay Network, Rob.

Your host is RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland).

Your last logon was at 08:39:23 on 03/17/89.

There are 67 users on 27 relays.



/HELP































 Relay Commands ***************

















/Bye . . . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay

/Channel  . . . . .Change to channel 

/COntact  . .Show Relay contact info

/Getop . . . . . Try to summon a Relay operator

/Help. . . . . . . . . . . . . Prints this list

/INFo. . . . . . . . . . . Send RELAY INFO file

/Invite  . . .Invite user to your channel

/LINks . . . . . . . . . . .Shows active relays

/List. . . . . . . . . . . List active channels

/Msg   . . . .Sends private message

/Nick . . . . . . Change your nickname

/NAmes  . . . . .Show users with names

/Rates . . . . . . . . . .Display message rates

/SErvers . . . . Show relays serving node

/Signon   . . . .Signon to Relay

/Signon ,SHIFT . . Forces uppercase shift

/Signon ,UNSHIFT . Forces lowercase shift

/Signoff . . . . . . . . . . Signoff from Relay

/SIGNUP . Signup or change full name

/STats . . . . . . . . Display Relay statistics

/SUmmon @. . Invite user to Relay

/Topic  . . . . Topic for your channel

/Who  . . . . Show users and nicknames

/WHOIs . . . . . . . .Identify a nickname



/LINKS 

RELAY Version 01.24x0 Host RELAY@FINHUTC (Finland)

Relay  RELAY  @ CEARN   (  Geneva  ) ->  Finland

Relay  RELAY  @ DEARN   ( Germany  ) ->  Geneva

Relay  RELAY  @ AEARN   ( Austria  ) ->  Germany

Relay  RELAY  @CZHRZU1A (  Zurich  ) ->  Geneva

Relay  RELAY  @ HEARN   ( Holland  ) ->  Geneva

Relay  RELAY  @TAUNIVM  ( TAUrelay ) ->  Geneva

Relay  RELAY  @EB0UB011 (Barcelona ) ->  Geneva

Relay  RELAY  @ ORION   (New_Jersey) ->  Geneva

Relay  RELAY  @ BITNIC  ( NewYork  ) ->  New_Jersey

Relay  RELAY  @JPNSUT10 (  Tokyo   ) ->  NewYork

Relay  RELAY  @ VILLVM  (Philadelph) ->  New_Jersey

Relay  RELAY  @NDSUVM1  (No_Dakota ) ->  New_Jersey

Relay  RLY   @CORNELLC (Ithaca_NY ) ->  New_Jersey

Relay  RELAY  @ UTCVM   (Tennessee ) ->  Pittsburgh

Relay  RELAY  @UIUCVMD  (Urbana_IL ) ->  Pittsburgh

Relay  RELAY  @CANADA01 ( Canada01 ) ->  Ithaca_NY

Relay  RELAY  @  AUVM   ( Wash_DC  ) ->  Va_Tech

Relay  RELAY  @ VTVM2   ( Va_Tech  ) ->  Ithaca_NY

Relay  RELAY  @UALTAVM  ( Edmonton ) ->  Canada01

Relay  RELAY  @NYUCCVM  (   Nyu    ) ->  New_Jersey

Relay  RELAY  @  UWF    (Pensacola ) ->  Va_Tech

Relay MASRELAY@  UBVM   ( Buffalo  ) ->  Ithaca_NY

Relay  RELAY  @CMUCCVMA (Pittsburgh) ->  Ithaca_NY

Relay  RELAY  @PURCCVM  (  Purdue  ) ->  Pittsburgh

Relay  RELAY  @UREGINA1 (Regina_Sk ) ->  Canada01

Relay  RELAY  @ GITVM1  ( Atlanta  ) ->  Tennessee

The Relay servers were connected between each other in a rudimentary multicast

Multicast

In computer networking, multicast is the delivery of a message or information to a group of destination computers simultaneously in a single transmission from the source creating copies automatically in other network elements, such as routers, only when the topology of the network requires...

fashion, so messages would travel hop by hop along the network of servers. A behaviour that inspired the name of the system to be Relay

Relay race

During a relay race, members of a team take turns running, orienteering, swimming, cross-country skiing, biathlon, or ice skating parts of a circuit or performing a certain action. Relay races take the form of professional races and amateur games...

.

The time it took for a message to get to a recipient varied. Most of the time messages within the United States didn't take more than a few seconds. Sometimes, however, messages could take many minutes or even hours to arrive if network links were down, because BITNET would store and forward

Store and forward

Store and forward is a telecommunications technique in which information is sent to an intermediate station where it is kept and sent at a later time to the final destination or to another intermediate station. The intermediate station, or node in a networking context, verifies the integrity of...

them later.

A downside to Bitnet Relay was that it was enforced network-wide as the only permitted chat system

Online chat

. Users were not allowed to develop alternate chat systems, be it for personal research, fun or a craving for privacy. Experimental chats like Galaxy Network or VM/Shell were asked to shut down before they gained popularity.

Bitnet Relay was used mostly in the late 1980s when Valdis Kletnieks at Virginia Tech released a Pascal

Pascal (programming language)

Pascal is an influential imperative and procedural programming language, designed in 1968/9 and published in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a small and efficient language intended to encourage good programming practices using structured programming and data structuring.A derivative known as Object Pascal...

version from scratch that consumed far less CPU time

CPU time

CPU time is the amount of time for which a central processing unit was used for processing instructions of a computer program, as opposed to, for example, waiting for input/output operations. The CPU time is often measured in clock ticks or as a percentage of the CPU's capacity...

and early 1990s when Smart Relay appeared which allowed more impressive handling of message delivery.

Kell himself once predicted the demise of Bitnet Relay, his prophecy proved true for reasons far different than the ones he himself gave. TCP/IP and the advent of the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

spelled the end of BITNET

BITNET

BITNET was a cooperative USA university network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs at the City University of New York and Greydon Freeman at Yale University...

entirely and Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

did not have a similar socket mechanism. However the Relay Chat itself was somewhat closely replicated by Jarkko Oikarinen

Jarkko Oikarinen

Jarkko Oikarinen is the inventor of the first Internet chat network, called Internet Relay Chat , where he is known as WiZ. While working at the University of Oulu in August 1988, he wrote the first IRC server and client programs, which he produced to replace the MUT program on the Finnish BBS...

's Internet Relay Chat

Internet Relay Chat

External links

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