Background Information for the RELAY Historical Pages

These pages are still under construction. The last modifications I have to make are just minor ones, and they will be finished within a few days from now, one of them is a no-frames version. And now it is December the 5^th.

The EARN/BITnet RELAY pages can only be seen in a historical context. With the decline of BITnet and the advance of Internet chat utilities, the original (yes, the original) RELAY belongs to a past, never to be remembered by the majority of the Internet users.

The RELAY pages were stored at the web-server at the University of Nijmegen, at the time I was a RELAY masteroperator. As the pages have no definite purpose anymore, I decided to move them to my personal pages. If there is a more suited place to put the pages, I would be glad to be informed.

I have no purpose nor intention to give an introduction or history of RELAY. There are only two intentions to save the pages.

• Keeping some information that served a purpose in the past.
• Creating a historical context.

The pages are presented as is. No further modifications have been made, only for the purpose for not obscuring history. HTML has been developed since and there are a lot of 'improvements' that could be made to the pages, even up to the point of eliminating HTML errors. So be it!
The pages are embedded in a frame now, where there is a constant reminder of the historical meaning. I have made no navigation bar, so navigating is sometimes only possible with help of the back button.

Note for former Relay operators:

Former Relay operators of the EARN/BITnet Relay Network can submit their contributions or remarks. In due time I will compele them (if any) into a seperate page, linked to this one.

Former Relay users are invited to send any remark, comment or suggestion to me, so I can improve the historical contextualization of these pages, and compile them also into a seperate page.

• EARN/BITnet conversion table
  These pages help in converting BITnet e-mail addresses to Internet addresses.
• RELAY Personality Page
• EARN Historical Archives

Thanks to... all the former EARN/BITnet Relay users over the world. With special thanks to a lot of them in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland and Hungary. (Maybe a 'Relay Missing Persons' page would be in place? ;-)