CPREMOTE was the first example of a “service virtual machine” and was motivated partly by the desire to prove the usefulness of that concept.
At SHARE XLVI, in February, 1976, Hendricks and Hartmann reported that the network, which was now beginning to be called VNET, spanned the continent and connected 50 systems.
By 1986, IBM’s Think magazine estimated that VNET was saving the company $150,000,000 per year as the result of increased productivity.
It spanned North America (in Canada it was known as NetNorth), Europe (as EARN), India (TIFR) and some Persian Gulf states (as GulfNet).
BITNET was also very popular in other parts of the world, especially in South America, where about 200 nodes were implemented and heavily used in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Newer versions of RSCS, as well as Jnet and the various UNIX NJE stacks, provided support for TCPNJE line drivers.
...RSCS is the operating system used to provide information transfer among machines linked with communications facilities.
[3] From a technical point of view, RSCS differed from ARPANET in that it was a point-to-point "store and forward" network, as such it was more like UUCP.
Unlike ARPANET, it did not require dedicated Interface Message Processor or continuous network connections.
In case of a broken network connection RSCS would retain the message and retry transmission when the remote system became available.