As with so many old things, it's still alive, but it's down to the die-hards. I still miss it, though - I participated in Net 232 (Champaign-Urbana) for a while, then Net 115 in Chicago. We had some great gatherings back in those days, but in the Chicago area, the scene blew away pretty quickly when the internet opened up.
Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#32I also remember using the BlueWave offline mail reader: * https://en.everybodywiki.com/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader) As well as the QWK and SOUP file formats (the latter when I started on Usenet as well): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) * https://web.archive.org/web/20080509070947/http://combee.tec... And Tradewars 2002 'door game': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars * https://breakintochat.com/wi…
I was a big fan of msged on my Net 115 point. https://github.com/jrnutt/msged
BinkleyTerm was another favorite of mine, but I'm not sure of this version's lineage: https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
[flagged]
Possible.
Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe.
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#34[flagged]
There was also a locality to BBSs (less so the distributed relay systems like Fidonet) because of the cost of non-local telephone calls. I was a subscriber to a BBS is a relatively nearby city (though telephone costs were still high--used offline readers). A number of us would get together in-real-life semi-regularly.
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#35I do remember. :) Posted the same question ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932 The archives are almost completely gone and only a small fraction is available on internet. Perhaps some still exist on old harddrives - but I wouldn't count on it. Disk space wasn't cheap back then.
Well, and hard drives fail and there weren't really great economical backup options at the time. In spite of being active on one BBS in particular, I basically have nothing digital saved from that time.
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#36Of course! There was a time we were encouraged to be friendly with Russia, and many Russian devs were on Fidonet. This was actually how some I knew were recruited to work for western companies.
The ex-USSR segment of FIDONET became the largest in the world around 1995-1996. Internet access was rare and very expensive until around 2000.
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Possible. Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe. https://keybase.io/rozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie
Their account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie.
HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#38Of course! There was a time we were encouraged to be friendly with Russia, and many Russian devs were on Fidonet. This was actually how some I knew were recruited to work for western companies.
Is your username an homage or your actual handle on fidonet?
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#392:5019/19
Former 2:5034/16 here.
I was born too late and missed most of the fun, but still managed to catch the trailing end of fidonet in the late 2000s. Pretty much everything was over IP already, there wasn't a single proper dial-up node in my local network (which was pretty small already, around 20 nodes in its heyday), but for me this IP connection happened to be a pay-by-the-minute dialup ISP, so the offline nature of fidonet helped me stay glued to the computer and actively participate in dozens of communities with just a few expensive online minutes per day. Later in highschool (I even managed to find a teenage crush my age from another city in some echo! we exchanged pics with uuencode in netmail =D) I ran my own dialup node just for fun on an old PII with NT4 in a cardboard box under my bed. It survived multiple hardware and geographical moves and was running over IP up to about 2012-ish, and was finally nuked from the nodelist in 2018. I still have all the configs in the backups somewhere and the active NCs contact, so technically could get it back up if really wanted to. Too bad there's nobody there to speak to.
Addition: turned out, nowadays you can just run the "normal" FTN stack (binkd, husky, golded) in a docker container and access it with a browser. "It's not dead, it's just smells like it". https://kuehlbox.wtf/projects,fidian - no affiliation.
Re: Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possible. Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe. https://keybase.io/rozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie
Their account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie. HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz…
Right, which is why my first instinct was to write “possible”.
If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!