Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

History of Fidonet (1993)

olografix.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 76 posts

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#51

Post by u801e »

alor wrote: post #50

I've always struggled to understand how Fidonet (and BBSes) was different to Usenet. From what I gathered, Usenet was a decentralised network from the start, whereas BBSes were distinct communities and Fidonet was a solution to connect these communities together. I believe Usenet also runs on TCP/IP, unlike BBSes which you dialed into. Can anyone shed some light on the above?

This was posted on HN several days ago:

https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.htm...

Usenet didn't start out by running over TCP/IP.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#52

Post by u801e »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #21

What I miss most from those days is strict quoting code: АN>> this was the original message SG> first reply, text _below_ the quotation With more levels, original initials were preserved, quotes we're kept at necessary minimum, and email correspondence was very organized. Not the mess we have now with replies at the top and the rest of all thread below

I spent over a decade on usenet and only saw that convention used a handful of times. Most of the time, clients would just use multiple > or | symbols to indicate quoting level without any initials.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#53

Post by yakk0 »

throw0101a wrote: post #10
magoon wrote: post #8

Running a FidoNet-connected BBS meant I had direct access to read every EchoMail group I could subscribe my BBS to. At the time it was a great source of real, insightful written conversation. Because the readers were text-based, and it was all on my hard drive, I could consume postings at such great speed. (spacebar, spacebar, spacebar...) The memories.

> Because the readers were text-based, and it was all on my hard drive, I could consume postings at such great speed. You didn't have to run a BBS to do this. Using an offline mail reader like Blue Wave [1] and downloading QWK files [2] allowed anyone to do it—and helped keep the lines, as downloading was (relatively) quick compared to reading 'online'. I initially got "on" Usenet by downloading SOUP files from a loc…

Blue Wave was the first piece of shareware I registered. I still have the floppy.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#54

Post by em-bee »

EricE wrote: post #42

Net209 - those were the days. Of course having a local call to the Western Star didn't hurt either ;-) Sysop meetings at Shakey's Pizza - nothing beats in person meet ups! EDIT: It just dawned on me - how amazing is it that now that long distance calls are generally free (at least here in the US) that lots of people don't get the significance of "local call". What at time.

they already didn't get it in the 90s.

from the early days of the internet:

a host is a host from coast to coast, and noone will call a host that close, unless the host that isn't close, is busy hung or dead.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#55

Post by ggm »

It does me no credit but I feel I must admit throughout the eighties and nineties many of my fellow sysadmins and I were not kind about Fido and like BBS, from our extremely privileged and funded dialup inter-uni UUCP and subsequently TCP/IP world view, it was already dead. These kinds of cultural snobbery do us no credit, and it's clear that nicer and wiser heads than mine ran cross connects and it became what John Quartermain called "the matrix" long before the movie.

I was an upstream of one or two BBS for a few years, gatewaying Usenet news and email. We treated them exactly like the UUCP and ACSnet feeds, and the military over x.25 and OSI x.400 mail, but we didn't always feel very charitable towards them.

I now respect this kind of self organised bootstrapping behaviour much more.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#57

Post by ztjio »

FidoNet (and similars, like WWIVnet) directly led to my career today which is largely centered around distributed data systems (and how the data flows around them.)

If I hadn't been fascinated with projects like reimplementing WWIV's network protocol to bridge it to my FIDONet supporting BBS, or implementing IEMSI and other things surrounding echomail/etc. I don't think I'd have developed the necessary interest to become a career software engineer, especially not in this space.

I really miss that moment in tech. The social connections were still somewhat on a "natural" scale and showed hope for improving the world instead of clearly damning it. I appreciate many other improvements that have happened, don't think I truly pine for those times overall. But the mass open social networks of now are truly ruining society and being involved in progressing this kind of communication makes me feel at fault, if even only for an infinitesimally small amount.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#58

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

u801e wrote: post #52
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #21

What I miss most from those days is strict quoting code: АN>> this was the original message SG> first reply, text _below_ the quotation With more levels, original initials were preserved, quotes we're kept at necessary minimum, and email correspondence was very organized. Not the mess we have now with replies at the top and the rest of all thread below

I spent over a decade on usenet and only saw that convention used a handful of times. Most of the time, clients would just use multiple > or | symbols to indicate quoting level without any initials.

Just opened a random echo conference archive [1], and thistype of quoting is everywhere. Maybe it's the regional thing, of course, or just because everyone used GoldEd editor, which supported such quotes very well.

[1] http://www.fandom.ru/fido/ru_fantasy/text/303.htm

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#59

Post by henrikschroder »

richard_todd wrote: post #15

It was chilling to read the last section (starting “This was pretty cool ... for a while ...“). The network got big enough that people who “had nothing to do with the design, creation or maintenance of the FidoNet software” started asserting control over how the project was run, and forming committees. Shortly after, it sounds like political struggles led to forks and disillusioned members. When I think about all the…

The thing with FidoNet though, after they created the hierarchical zone:net/node.point system, is that the higher up in the hierarchy you were, the higher your phonebills would be, and the more responsibility you had in the form of delivering the mail of your downstream nodes. Everyone was "indebted" to the people above them in the hierarchy, creating an almost feudal system.

But at the same time, you had to be technically competent to be a higher-up, to be a coordinator of some sort. And if you weren't, everyone below you would simply move to a different upstream node, or demote you from your position. So it was a weird meritocratic sort of feudal system.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#60

Post by reuven »

I have lots of good memories of FidoNet. I was a teenager with a modem, computer, and lots of curiosity. I had been using BBSes for a few years, but they were all local to me, dialing up to various numbers where I lived (Long Island, New York).

The idea that I could connect not just to people on a local system, but with others around the world, was just amazing.

I wasn't a part of the technical infrastructure, and I clearly missed out on a lot of the politics and discussion... but I had lots of good discussions with others, and even contributed a few articles to FidoNews back in the day. The fact that they were willing to let a teenager write for them was extremely encouraging for me.

Thanks to all of the FidoNet folks for the amazing stuff that they did, and for giving me a taste of an online community before using the Internet when I started college.

Post reply on HN