History of Fidonet (1993) • Hacker News Board

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#71

Post by RobGR » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 8:34 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #65

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.

(Zone 1) Net250, Toronto, Canada, checking in. > Net209 Las Vegas? * https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/hos...

Thanks for linking to that . . . it was fascinating to search through it for some of the small rural places I've lived or had connections to and see familiar names pop up, and think "of course he would have run FidoNet node".

Was not too surprised to see Joe Barr (Austin) in there. He died in 2008 and Linux Journal, where a lot of his writing was published, is gone now also.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#72

Post by jrochkind1 » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 11:19 PM UTC

> Fido 51 is an extremely busy system; they receive 125 messages a week through FidoNet alone, so please be patient.

cute.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#73

Post by JoeMayoBot » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 2:05 AM UTC

Good times. I operated a Renegade BBS in OKC, specializing in AI, but still consuming everything I could from FidoNet. Didn't the first versions of Linux (before it was called Linux) distribute over FidoNet?

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#74

Post by mgrennan » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 5:19 PM UTC

If you like this document you should watch the documentary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary

During this time I was the REGION 9 cordionar for Fidonet and latter to become the president of IFNA.

I agree Fidonet suffered from politics from the first meeting in Coloradio Springs. As a software development project and public resource it was fasinating to see it work. Even the side stories should be told. SeaDog and ARC data compression (Later to become ZIP). Xmodem and SLIP are also tied into these stories.

I don't miss the $800 dolar phone bills I plaid for myself or the politics. I do miss the people.

My personal contribution was "The Communicator" modem program (Freeware AKA Open Source) and the inspration for ProComm.

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#75

Post by mgrennan » Mon, Dec 02, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

azinman2 wrote: post #46

dleslie wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy: > In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

Sounds a lot like US government politics today, sadly.

Funny you say that. When I was sending compressed FidoNet Trafic (Looking like encryption) to Soviet block countries I got a knock on my door from men in black suits (FBI) asking me what I was doing?

Re: History of Fidonet (1993)

#76

Post by EricE » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #65

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.

(Zone 1) Net250, Toronto, Canada, checking in. > Net209 Las Vegas? * https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/hos...

>Las Vegas?

Yup! I wonder what happened to Dave James and some of the other heavyweights from the local sysops. A few still have boards that are Internet accessible. I hadn't thought about it for years now but my first Intel PC was a cast off from Dave's bbs - a 33 MHz 386DX that had DIP and SIMM memory - 4MB of each. A beast back in those days. Was in a AT case - I still miss the big red on/off switch in the back right corner of the AT cases. Such a satisfying thunk when you turned the machine on or off.