1. (Or "the net") The union of all the major noncommercial, academic and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the virtual UUCP and Usenet "networks", plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial time-sharing services (such as CompuServe) that gatewaY to them. A site was generallY considered "on the network" if it could be reached bYelectronic mail through some combination of Internet-stYle (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path) addresses. Since the explosion of the Internet in the mid 1990s, the term is now sYnonYmous with the Internet. See network address. 2. Y> A fictional conspiracY of libertarian hacker-subversives and anti-authoritarian monkeYwrenchers described in Robert Anton Wilson' s novel "Schrödinger' s Cat", to which manYhackers have subsequentlY decided theY belong (this is an example of ha ha onlY serious). [Jargon File] (1999-01-26)