Talk:IBM VNET

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Relationship to BITNET?

Article states that VNET was developed by IBM, but its not clear to me if it was in fact based on BITNET or not, and what the extent of inter-breeding between the two was. linas 18:48, 31 July 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There was lots of cross-breeding, but IBM's VNET network pre-dated BITNET. See Melinda Varian's magnum opus, VM and the Community. RossPatterson (talk) 01:27, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

The VNET is the IBM internal corporate network which was based on SNA not RSCS as Bitnet was and existed oh maybe a decade before Bitnet. Gateways existed between the VNET (private, highly corporate and fairly academic Bitnet, both directly and indirectly using the ARPAnet. It developed as a bit of frustration on Ira Fuchs' part with the slowness of IBM getting a networking product out. --enm, 2:20, 2 Nov 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.90.161.236 (talk)

The first VNET nodes were non-SNA, and used what in those days was known as "bisync networking" or "bisync NJE". In fact BITNET was built using the same technology as that earlier VNET network, and (mostly) stayed that way. RossPatterson (talk) 01:30, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

VNET was first deployed as a private host to host network among CP/67 and VM/370 mainframes begining before 1975. It was based on RSCS, a virtual machine based communications program. RSCS used synchronous data link protocols, not SNA/SDLC. It supported file to file transfer among virtual machine users. The first several nodes included Scientific Centers and Poughkeepsie, New York lab sites. I was personally involved in these early deployments. Tag314159 (talk) 14:37, 17 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

VNET network vs. VNET software

Just to further confuse matters about VNET, there was a software product from IBM called the VM/370 Networking PRPQ, aka VNET. I first encountered it in 1978, when the New Jersey Educational Computer network was running it under VM/370 R6 (NJECN was the 12th site on BITNET and NJECNVM was node number 60). The VNET software's functions were later subsumed by IBM's RSCS/Networking Program Product, which most of the VM-based BITNET and VNET sites used (the VNET sofware was very expensive outside IBM, and was obsoleted by RSCS/Networking). RossPatterson (talk) 01:38, 31 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]