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

https://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt

by BruceEel • 2 months ago

185 80 2 months ago

fidonet.org

specialist• 2 months ago

Appreciate this share.

Whenever I hear about this new fangled AT protocol all the kids are jazzed about, I get all wistful for the BBS era.

FidoNet & PC-Relay were pretty fanfastic. For the time, obv.

Source: Was sysadmin for a hub.

BruceEel2• 2 months ago

Aye, they were. I also liked listening to this [1] (Jason Scott's) interview with Mark Herring.

[1] https://archive.org/details/20021102-bbs-herring/Mark+Herrin...

icedchai• 2 months ago

I loved that era. I was a BBSer from about 1988 through 1994 or so, on several systems with FidoNet and RelayNet / RIME. I also ran my own BBS for a while, eventually it had some Usenet newsgroups and Internet email through UUCP (anyone remember bang paths?)

What I miss most is the local community aspect. In my teens and early 20's I met several friends through BBSes.

numbsafari• 2 months ago

This is how I grew up. Using fidonet via my local RPGA group.

mcc1ane• 2 months ago

(1993)

pgrote• 2 months ago

Respected the process for getting on Fidonet. You had to figure it out, configure it properly and prove you were ready to go before you got a node number. No hand holding. Frontdoor and national mail hour.

nandomrumber2• 2 months ago

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

drillsteps5• 2 months ago

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 of a filter so that most people on there were geeks.

Later on of course some nodes started distributing over the Internet so setting up a node became much easier (and I think there was a way for the node to allow multiple users read/write without even setting up a node/point at all).

timbit422• 2 months ago

Sysops did but BBS users didn't need to do that.

NuSkooler• 2 months ago

For those interested, FidoNet and "Alt nets" such as fsxNet are still going and active!

sedatk4• 2 months ago

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 whom I still see today. It was such a tight-knit friendly community.

The advent of Internet killed it but some communities are still active on other platforms.

sedatk4• 2 months ago

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

reconnecting6• 2 months ago

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

chris_armstrong• 2 months ago

I completely forgot about Wolverine, but you've reminded me I was using that back in the day to read my mail from Fidonet point (as well as Bluewave).

egorfine5• 2 months ago

2:463/1161 here. Nostalgia is strong with this one.

reconnecting6• 2 months ago

Sysop?

egorfine5• 2 months ago

Yell for sysop!

vzaliva• 2 months ago

2:463/80

egorfine5• 2 months ago

Ого! Обнял-поднял!:)

sixothree• 2 months ago

1:396/78

influx• 2 months ago

4:920/35 here :)

czw22• 2 months ago

2:5058/35 :)

maximilianburke• 2 months ago

formerly 1:153/7015 here

reconnecting6• 2 months ago

Guys, I don't get it.

Were you all node sysops, or did your region just not have that last part — the point?

Zone:Net/Node.Point

egorfine5• 2 months ago

I have had points, like 2:463/702.160 and then 2:463/131.160

But then later I became a Boss and got my own Node address 2:463/1161

czw22• 2 months ago

I started as a point but after couple of years I become a node with a few points (mainly friends and family).

rnxrx2• 2 months ago

I always knew the "point" was there, but never saw it actually used in my travels (..which finished in '90 or '91). I seem to recall the node lists at some point didn't have decimals, but perhaps my recollection is inaccurate.

mcfist• 2 months ago

привет от 2:464 :)

egorfine5• 2 months ago

Агонь! Харьков <3

rnxrx2• 2 months ago

99:9008/206 / 1:137/206

ricudis• 2 months ago

2:410/3 here. These were some of the best days!

timbit422• 2 months ago

1:255/42 here

dsrtslnd23• 2 months ago

I feel like polling mail 30+ years ago on ISDN + zipped mail file from my fido net node was faster than IMAP on my 1 gbit connection now.

tycoon666• 2 months ago

Best social network in history!

t435623• 2 months ago

5:7211/1.27 here - though I think this address is long long gone. I'm gobsmacked that I can remember it. :-)

We got fidonet in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. It was utterly revolutionary for us - more than the internet that came later really. For the first time we could communicate with my two brothers overseas without paying for extremely exorbitant international telephone calls that lasted a couple of minutes at best.

Our modem was 2400bps (8-N-1 IIRC). We used the zmodem protocol. It was after I learned about computers but I learned a HUGE amount from this about protocols etc. Our phone system was terrible so error correction etc were of great importance. Working out how to dial slowly was also important for our terrible phone exchanges.

It let me keep in touch with my pal, K, who emigrated to South Africa and as a result he ended up sending me 21 1.2MB floppy disks with SLS Linux on them and kernel 0.99 (I think). The journey began! :-)

iberator2• 2 months ago

cool story :)

liotier2• 2 months ago

In Harare in 1998, I remember the pleasant surprise of finding a good "internet café" in some downtown office building... Was Fidonet still active in Zimbabwe at that time, or had Internet access supplanted it already ?

t435623• 2 months ago

"Mango", which was the name of the fidonet node, probably still existed but was on its way out. I was at university in SA by then. I know it was still around in 1996 but I cannot find all my backedup emails to see if my parents were still sending me emails from the mango fido/internet bridge after that time.

ck2• 2 months ago

one thing I distinctly remember is that when simultaneous two-way Zmodem transfers came out replacing Ymodem, it absolutely blew my mind

(previously all transfers, Xmodem/Ymodem, were one-way with CRC checks on each block slowing things down)

bluGill• 2 months ago

Ymodem-g (I think I remember that correctly) was faster than Zmodem - but if the CRC failed it aborted the whole send. Often I was willing to take the risk. (at 300 baud that adds up)

kylemaxwell2• 2 months ago

My 8th-grade science project was doing a "statistical" analysis of X/Y/Zmodem transfers (and Kermit, I think?). It did well enough to get me to the county science fair here in Dallas, at least.

And yeah, Zmodem was mind-blowing for us.

iberator2• 2 months ago

zmodem/xmodem can still be used over ssh :) kermit is actually still in development.

I used it in like 2021 to transfer some data over serial from some really old laptop (386sx). Was faster than txp/ip over plip/slip

yummybear• 2 months ago

I have very fond memories of fidonet: discussions, friends made, parties held. I wish i was back there :)

reconnecting6• 2 months ago

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.

rendx• 2 months ago

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 later with a fake ID, and I woke up heavily wasted in the BBS owner's student apartment and we had microwaved frozen pizza together. Fun times.

thesuitonym2• 2 months ago

So go back. It's still there, just waiting for you!

mrandish3• 2 months ago

The most surprising thing about early and mid-80s hobbyist computer culture (BBSes, users groups, etc) is despite being so open, egalitarian and easy to join, more than half of everyone you'd meet would be someone cool, interesting and worth knowing. I still have several close friends who I met in those days through random computer clubs. All of my little group of friends went on to have fairly notable careers involved in cool computer products, projects or companies you've probably heard of. And over the decades, many others that I'd hung out with at early user's groups and local computer shows became notable enough to follow their adventures in industry magazines.

I don't think that was just a fluke of random luck. I suspect early 8-bit hobby computing (especially outside universities) was an almost perfect gating filter. Nothing was very easy, little was well documented and frankly, it wasn't yet all that much fun. While there was some fun to be had, there were always bits of barbed wire and broken glass to crawl over first, whether typing in BASIC listings from a poorly printed 'zine (inevitably with a few misprints to debug), or figuring out at which volume level software might load from finicky cassette tapes. And even when you got something to finally work, the fun came in short bursts before the next cryptic barrier would arise.

The experience never quite lived up to what we'd imagined owning a hobby computer would be like while we were saving up our pennies to buy our own. But we persevered, driven forward by the sunk cost, brief interludes of fun and faith that tons of 'awesome' lay just ahead. The lack of relevant information beyond a few monthly magazines forced early hobbyists to find each other in ad hoc user's groups and then via BBSes. When I got my 4K, 800 Khz, 8-bit personal computer in 1981, no other person in my entire extended family's social circles knew anyone else who owned a computer at home. Even the concept sounded as strange as owning a "personal cement truck". The first question was always, "A what...?" followed by "Why?" So, despite being just a teenager, my desperation for information forced me to start a user's group simply for lack of there being any in my area. And it quickly grew to several hundred members despite my ineptitude and lack of experience at... well, anything. It turns out, the hearty souls both enthusiastic and naive enough to buy a computer for a hobby in those days, then persevere through failure and continue to connect with other lost users - ended up filtering for some unique qualities.

While the instant global connection (and gratification) of the web is amazing and immensely powerful, one thing we've perhaps lost along the way is that kind natural filter.

Karrot_Kream• 2 months ago

There was a minimum level of stability you needed in your life at that time to be able to own a computer and pay the phone bills needed back then (I came later in the mid 90s-00s but it wasn't too much different by then.) Kids needed parents who had that stability, and most of those parents probably kept a decent eye on their kids. Even then, I remember some real characters in the computing scene from when I was a kid.

Now you can have crippling health issues and still post on the internet. In fact, you're probably more inclined to spend time online if interacting with the offline world is so tough. This was much harder from '85-05.

drob518• 2 months ago

Blast from the past.

tobi_bsf• 2 months ago

Was a great time, completely free of spam, ai slop and mostly even political stuff. the world is really developing backwards.

asjo• 2 months ago

Oh, there was some spam and a lot of political stuff due to the hierarchical nature of Fidonet. Tiny Denmark had 3 networks.

No AI slop, luckily. And a lot of fun.

I used to run 2:230/149 on Fidonet. Can't remember my AmiNet address.

kseistrup• 2 months ago

I used to run 2:230/119, and I used .5 as my point address.

nickdothutton• 2 months ago

I too remember. Where is the "FidoNet" of today?

thesuitonym2• 2 months ago

https://www.fidonet.org/

lukifer• 2 months ago

NOSTR [0] is a store and forward relay service, ostensibly a distributed Twitter clone, but also highly extensible [1] to support other functionality.

[0] Notes & Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays: https://nostr.com/

[1] https://nips.nostr.com/

chadgpt3• 2 months ago

Usenet. https://eternal-september.org/

washadjeffmad• 2 months ago

Can't hear Fidonet without recommending BBS: The Documentary (2005)

youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE

LouisvilleGeek• 2 months ago

Amiga 500 + Fidonet brings back such fond memories.

kylemaxwell2• 2 months ago

This was my first exposure to an internet (as opposed to the Internet), via BBSs, when I was a teenager. I keep thinking we should bring the term "sysop" back, in fact.

Nostalgia may be a form of depression, I've been told, but a little touch of it once in a while is good for the soul.

ex-aws-dude• 2 months ago

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

JdeBP• 2 months ago

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.

biodiesel• 2 months ago

:inbound host WAN f6.n105.z1.fidonet.org

mrandish3• 2 months ago

Circa 1985, I ran a BBS for my computer club and when a Fidonet feature was offered in the software I activated it and figured out how to connect to a larger relay BBS in my area code. It was really magical in those toll-call days to see messages that had relayed across the entire country in just a couple days - entirely FOR FREE. It was like a dial-up modem Pony Express! This was especially amazing for us 8-bit micro hobbyists in the early and mid-80s who were scratching out an isolated existence in the wild wastelands of ad hoc user's groups and BBS' far beyond the gated walls of universities, government and big corp IT depts - we'd never even seen early Usenet!

I lived near Los Angeles at the time and still remember meeting some guys in New York City entirely via free FidoNet messages. A few months later, for other reasons, I happened to make my first ever trip to New York and actually met up with those Fidonet friends and hung out with them. Good times.

jlundberg• 2 months ago

It is hard today to grasp what Fidonet really was. But for me and many others it was such a life changing thing.

Do you know of any good articles, books or blog post written for outsiders to read?

garethsprice• 2 months ago

https://www.fidonet.org/inet92_Randy_Bush.txt - contemporary account that is still a pretty good overview

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary has an episode entirely on Fidonet (creative commons, freely available online)

Memories of being amazed to see messages from all around the world arriving to my hometown's local BBS, merely days after they were posted.

abc123abc123• 2 months ago

It is the truth. The fact that it took some effort to get on there was a great filter of people.

I sometimes think there will be a renaissance for Fidonet-like networks, when our politicians have banned encryption, implemented complete surveillance and generally destroyed the internet.

It would be a great irony, if we then went back to the networks of our childhood in order to be free.

I guess the other option might be i2p or something similar, but that is probably too easily accessible to remain free when the authoritarians in power lock down the internet.

trashb• 2 months ago

For anyone that wants to experience fidonet or bbses, I can recommend the Synchronet client and their BBS List. They are very up to date. https://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html

BBSes with fidonet are still available to connect to today (see the Network column in the previously linked list).

joeygibson• 2 months ago

I had a Fidonet connection for a while, and I also was a UUCP node for a couple of years. That was cool, getting Usenet news delivered over a 2400 baud modem.

giamma• 2 months ago

I was a point of two local bbses, my setup was Binkley Term as mailer, GoldEd as editor, plus a third tool, the tosser, whose name I cannot remember now. Everything running on OS/2 Warp.

carlsagat• 2 months ago

My point was 2:344/14.19 Very good times!!

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

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