2026-03-12 12:16 UTC
At the 1987 Spring NETCON, Jeff Kell gave a presentation on Relay where he concluded "Relay is on the verge of collapse. […] It is no longer due to network load. It is only marginally due to CPU load. It is due to the users."
The Bitnet Relay software was rebuilt in compiled Pascal, with a binary network protocol that was much more efficient.
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@kcase@mastodon.social 2026-03-12 12:36
Ultimately, with NSFNet expanding in '88 and commercial ISPs emerging in '89, we had more network and computing available than ever—just not on the IBM mainframes hosting Bitnet. Jarkko Oikarinen took inspiration from Bitnet's Relay and built the Internet Relay Chat (irc) for Unix. It was a little slow to take off, and has had its own drama (with net splits, etc.), but anyone with a Unix system can run their own server—and as a result, some 36+ years later it's still around.