Notes on  THE NETWORK 

1. Historically, the union of all the major noncommercial, academic,
and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the pre-1990 ARPANET,
NSFnet, BITNET, and the virtual UUCP and USENET `networks', plus
the corporate in-house networks and commercial timesharing services
(such as CompuServe, GEnie and AOL) that gateway to them. A site is
generally considered on the network if it can be reached through some
combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path)
addresses. See INTERNET, BANG PATH, NETWORK ADDRESS.

2. Following the mass-culture discovery of the Internet in 1994 and
subsequent proliferation of cheap TCP/IP connections, "the network"
is increasingly synonymous with the Internet itself (as it was before
the second wave of wide-area computer networking began around 1980).

3. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives and
anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert Anton Wilson's
novel Schr�dinger's Cat, to which many hackers have subsequently
decided they belong (this is an example of HA HA ONLY SERIOUS).

In sense 1, the network is often abbreviated to the net. "Are you on
the net?" is a frequent question when hackers first meet face to
face, and "See you on the net!" is a frequent goodbye.

J3N Research Labs

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