Acronym for Because It’s Time Network. A WAN (wide area network) founded in 1981 and operated by the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN) in Washington, D.C. Now defunct, BITNET provided e-mail and file transfer services between mainframe computers at educational and research institutions in North America, Europe, and Japan. BITNET used the IBM Network Job Entry (NJE) protocol rather than TCP/IP, but it could exchange e-mail with the Internet. The listserv software for maintaining mailing lists was originated on BITNET.
Because It’s Time NETwork (or Because It’s There NETwork))