the network

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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