Network differences

[Henry Schaffer]

> 
> BITNET uses leased lines, but I don't know what hardware is neccesary.
> Because it has leased lines, communication between any two nodes is
> (nearly) instantaneous, or more accurately, you seldom have to wait more
> than several seconds for a message to get to it's destination.  In real
> extreme cases, you may have to wait several minutes, or if a node is down,
> you could wait indefinetely.
>         USnail: 6675 Crosby Rd, Lockport, NY 14094, USA
  The hardware needed is a modem on each end of the leased line, and then
the normal computer hook up to the modem.
  A comment on performance - it certainly can be this good when there is
little traffic.  However the delay can be *much* more than seconds-minutes
for a file transfer when there are many other files ahead of you.  (I think
that short e-mail messages are given priority over large files, so that
message transfer does work very well in practice.)
--henry schaffer