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BITNET

   Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see network,
   the).  The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and
   VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate
   using 80-character EBCDIC card images (see eighty-column
   mind); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of
   third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/RFC-822 world with
   annoying regularity.  BITNET is also notorious as the apparent home
   of BIFF.