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Creator of Relay On BITNET, Predecessor of IRC, Dies (blogs.com)
tmjva writes: Jeff Kell passed away on November 25 as reported here in the 3000newswire. He was inventor of BITNET Relay, a predecessor of Internet Relay Chat using the REXX programming language.
In 1987 he wrote the following preserved article about RELAY and here is his obituary. May this early inventor rest in peace.
In 1987 he wrote the following preserved article about RELAY and here is his obituary. May this early inventor rest in peace.
Goodbye and thank you Jeff, wherever you are.
He was a white boy. Even worse, he was an old white boy. his life did not matter does not, and never did mater. You know who's life does matter? Black lives matter. If you ain't black (or a member of another protected disefranchised minority class) your wack. All you racists need to start putting the stories in context of the stories greater affect on disenfranchised black latino transgendered African Americans living in a zone that will be shortly reclaimed by the ocean due to global warming.
Ooops I forgot to include indigenous cultures also. Those people are also important. I know they are important because they have their own month.
IRC better start worrying, its next in line for the chop
/me doesn't like the use of the word predecessor here.
PlanetVulkan.com
A host is a host from coast to coast
unless the host that isn't close
is busy, hung or dead.
that is how I remember it, does someone remember it better?
As is all too common these days, both the summary and article are right, but the headline is wrong. Jeff Kell did not invent BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork or Because It's There NETwork). BITNET was developed in the early '80s by Ira Fuchs of CUNY and Greydon Freeman, Inc. of Yale. It was an early store and forward network based on IBM protocols.
Both the summary and article correctly credit Jeff with the invention of BITNET RELAY which was a predecessor of IRC. It was important, but was just a component of BITNET.
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
pallid bodies and unpleasant Usenet. In 1995, i8 our group the fruitless get how people can the BSD li?cense, if desired, we They want you to join in. It can be
Very sad news. I knew Jeff well (back in Bitnet days.) His legacy is and will live on, certainly.
this *net*split won't reconnect ...
The closest I ever came to an Internet romance was on BITNET. It started on Relay, advanced to phone calls, and even an exchange of pictures (Polaroids through snail mail).
Was it serious? Well, it was enough to get me to keep logging on to IBM timesharing, when I was a dyed-in-the-wool VMS partisan.
Back in ye olden times, fond memories of hours lost at a green serial terminal, TALKing to peope all over the world.
When things worked solely by agreement, i.e. if you registered your nick at some server (IIRC NICKSERV), it was yours, and nobody touched it.