Talk:BITNET Relay

Predecessor to Relay?
There was a program that (I believe) started with "B" that was a direct predecessor to the RELAY system: does anyone else remember using it? I created my "SAREK" nick on that system in 1986, and carried it over to RELAY and other systems as time went on. --SarekOfVulcan 01:27, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * I think it was the "Billy" mentioned here.--SarekOfVulcan 01:07, 12 January 2006 (UTC)

Rename to Bitnet Relay
I never heard it called "Bitnet Relay Chat", when I joined it it was the "Interchat Relay Network", all Relay nodes introduced themselves as such. We in Nijmegen mostly used the "say" message processor, written by SuperTed/Okkie, which took the horrible header off the messages from RSCS and made it easier to send such messages with very short commands. -Rhialto.

I removed this passage as it applies to any chat system. When the counterpart is busy you multiplex: "As a strategy to deal with long lag times, users would talk to many people at once in a round-robin fashion as replies were returned."

Also, Rhialto, you are right - nobody ever called it "Bitnet Relay Chat," it was simply referred to as Relay as in "Meet you on relay after class". I think it would be more appropriate to rename the article into Bitnet Relay. Maybe the word chat actually came in because of the CHAT MODULE that most IBM/VM users had to have more comfortable user interface. Or maybe because of the word Interchat. Interchat Relay Network was how the system announced itself after /SIGNON. Nobody used that either. We could rename this article as such, but by trying out both names on google it seems that Bitnet Relay is by far a more popular way to reference this system. --lynX 12:05, 16 December 2006 (UTC)


 * ... putting name change into action --lynX 08:04, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Why this topic has no inline source ?
I feel this topic is needing inline sources or else it must be deleted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Notabede (talk • contribs) 05:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

External links modified
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"Chat"
Of possible interest to historians: before Relay there was "Chat", written by Bryan Davis while he was a student at State College Area High School (hence before 1985) and while he was affiliated with the Penn State Engineering Computer Lab (PSUECL). Chat was reached at CHAT@PSUECL, but was retired due to network inefficiency (RELAY's relay architecture was designed to address this kind of inefficiency). A hint of documentation of this is found in "Relay History": "I was a little late getting started to have used the original one at PSU". If Jeff Kell refers to Chat as "the original one" (on BITNET), it might well be. I don't know how to contact Bryan, but it might be possible. Bryan Davis worked at PSUECL under the supervision of Bryan Jensen, who also might remember Chat. Happy hunting! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.112.194.9 (talk) 05:11, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Deletion of sample output by Pppery
User:Pppery I contest that the section you have removed acts more like a textual (and thus more accessible) form of screenshot of how an interactive session looked like. It didn't really contain any instructions or explanations. As per #NOTMANUAL/6: "examples intended to inform rather than to instruct, may be appropriate for inclusion in Wikipedia articles" bkil (talk) 18:43, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * Sorry, no. Including the output of  clearly is an explanation. And even so the point of this article is to explain what the software is at a broad scale, not nitty-gritty details of how it works as the example did. * Pppery * it has begun...  18:59, 10 June 2024 (UTC)

So could it stay as a form of textual screenshot if we snipped the bulk of the help output? -bkil (talk) 19:23, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
 * What purpose would it serve? the point of this article is to explain what the software is at a broad scale, not nitty-gritty details of how it works as the example did * Pppery * it has begun... 19:29, 10 June 2024 (UTC)