BITNET Relay

Messages sent within the United States would take a few seconds to reach their destinations, but communication times varied in other countries or internationally.

One of the reasons Relay gained acceptance was that its system of peer servers decreased the network bandwidth consumed by group chat, due to no longer having to send multiple copies of the same message individually to each server.

Because of this efficiency and the limited bandwidth at the time, users were often not allowed to use or develop alternate chat systems[citation needed].

Experimental chats like Galaxy Network and VM/Shell were asked to shut down before they achieved noteworthy success.

Bitnet Relay gained popularity in the late 1980s when Valdis Kletnieks at Virginia Tech created a Pascal version that consumed far less CPU time, and again in the early 1990s when Smart Relay improved handling of message delivery.