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Binary Synchronous Transmission

Binary Synchronous Transmission (Bisynch) is an IBM link protocol, developed in the 1960 and popular in the 1970s and 1980s.

Binary Synchronous Transmission has been largely replaced in IBM environments with SDLC. Bisync was developed for batch communications between a System 360 mainframe and the IBM 2780 and IBM 3780 Remote Job Entry (RJE) terminals. It supports RJE and on-line terminals in the CICS/VSE environment. It operates with EBCDIC or ASCII character sets. It requires that every message be acknowledged (ACK) or negatively acknowledged (NACK) so it has high transmission overhead. It is typically character oriented and half-duplex, although some of the bisync protocol flavours or dialects support binary transmission and full-duplex operation.


Based on material from FOLDOC, used with permission. Update as needed.