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the network: n. 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
Schrödinger'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.
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