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Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

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Re: Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

#41

Post by reconnecting »

rendx wrote: post #39
reconnecting wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FidoNet was my first network. I still remember the sysops and the parties. An interesting aspect is that it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return, so it was a privilege to have your own FidoNet address.

> it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return Huh? Not when I joined in my region. I didn't have to provide anything. I was 14, but the BBS owner and mostly old guy heavy metal user base only found out when I later showed up at their annual user group meeting - and we had lots of fun (and drinks) together! They even took me clubbing…

Similar situation, except they know from the beginning that I'm 14, and they drink a lot of beer while I don't.

Re: Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

#45

Post by nandomrumber »

drillsteps5 wrote: post #11
nandomrumber wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn’t need to be a node to be on Fidonet.

Even if you were a "point" (an endpoint assigned to the node) you still had to set up the software and (in the mid-to-late 90s at least) set up a modem to call your node to upload/download. And sometimes you had to set up repeated dialing until you got through because the node could be busy (some nodes doubled as BBSs), or connection could be bad and it'd had to retry etc. Wasn't an easy task, so it served as a sort…

You didn’t even need to need a point to be on Fidonet.

Re: Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

#46

Post by reconnecting »

sedatk wrote: post #40
sedatk wrote: post #9

There was a FidoNet clone in Turkey called HitNet (short for “Hi Türkiye Net”). Its node addresses were like “8:103/119”. İ developed a Netmail server for Hitnet called HitBase in 1995 or so. It allowed people to discover others around their city to meet. Possibly the earliest thing that resembles Facebook. Similarly, it was a privacy nightmare too, luckily short-lived. HitNet introduced me to great people some of wh…

Forgot to add, I also developed a BlueWave-compatible offline-reader called Wolverine that worked for all Fido-style networks: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine It was quite popular in Turkey in the 90's. You can try it out in DOSBox here with some random HitNet packages: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine/releases/tag/2.32

WOW! Your FatalVision (1) is absolutely shiny! Wish I'd had it in the 90s.

Respect for the file_id.diz (2)! I thought mine was the last one on GitHub.

1. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision

2. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision/blob/master/file_id.diz

Re: Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

#47

Post by JdeBP »

ex-aws-dude wrote: post #36

Too young to have used it but I watched the BBS documentary recently and what surprised me was how much stuff was already possible pre-internet A lot of stuff I would typically associate with the internet like pirating, forums, mail, large scale multiplayer games actually predates it

Pre-World Wide Web, strictly, as the Internet pre-dated Fidonet by some years. The Internet almost, but not quite, preceded Teletext.

But yes, people did all of that many years before it was done on the World Wide Web.

(There's some complexity as to whether Usenet was an Internet thing early on, as it did the whole dial-up-over-PSTN thing, that Fidonet did, quite a lot before settling on mainly NNTP.)

More so that you think. Piracy was not actually most of it. There was a whole thriving shareware system, which in Fidonet was done via FREQs. Tens of thousands of nodes pushing archived shareware softwares, many long since forgotten, around the globe.

Re: Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

#48

Post by sedatk »

reconnecting wrote: post #46
sedatk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgot to add, I also developed a BlueWave-compatible offline-reader called Wolverine that worked for all Fido-style networks: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine It was quite popular in Turkey in the 90's. You can try it out in DOSBox here with some random HitNet packages: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine/releases/tag/2.32

WOW! Your FatalVision (1) is absolutely shiny! Wish I'd had it in the 90s. Respect for the file_id.diz (2)! I thought mine was the last one on GitHub. 1. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision 2. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision/blob/master/file_id.diz

Thanks! I loved working on it!
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