Tom was working on FidoNet in 1984, the same time my Iris co-founders and I had begun work on what became Lotus Notes. Architecturally, those of us who were working on collaborative systems in that era were shaped by the decentralized architecture of USEnet - inspired and motivated by the observation that a community could be brought together by something technologically as simple as uucp.
Both dial-up focused, Tom took this in the direction of a decentralized BBS, while I took it in the direction of masterless replicated nosql databases we called 'notefiles'. Identity being at the core, Tom was focused more on public community while we focused on private collaboration.
It was such an exciting time for emergent decentralization, shaped by a strong dose of 60's idealism.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...
Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
Looks like you can still hook up to it using a Synchronet BBS anyway using the steps available here: https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:fidonet
The homepage for FIDONet itself is here: https://www.fidonet.org/
And the Zone 1 Hub, Dark Realms (a Renegade BBS since 1994) is here: https://www.darkrealms.ca/ It has node lists available if you're looking for systems to connect from.
I'm not sure how I'd feel about an archive though, I'm sure I wrote a lot of childish nonsense on it! like a lot of things, perhaps best left as a happy memory...
There are 9 FidoNet nodes in my net. (154) I added 2 new ones within the last month or so.
My BBS is accessible at: https://warensemble.com It can also be accessed via SSH, Telnet, and possibly dialup but the program that handles my modem often checks out on me without warning (usually after a dropped call, which happens far too often over a VOIP line)
The joke is that Fidonet will eventually just be 2 sysops sending netmail back and forth to each other, where they argue about the policies and methods of how that mail is sent.
https://www.wired.com/1994/08/hacker-crackdown-italian-style...
Boy, I suspected it might have been before my time, but not that much!
Highly recommended.
* 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/wiki/TradeWars_2002
* https://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system)
When I want to learn a new programming language, I always try to recreate Tradewars in it as a language. I know Tradewars like the back of my hand, so it allows me to focus on the nuances of the language while I build it. Such a fun project. The only thing I never quite figured out were the economics mechanics (it technically works, but it's a bit more predictable than TW2002 has in practice) and the Big Bang algorithm (I came up with my own, it's fine, but it doesn't have quite the same feel to it).
Less often, I'll try to create SRE/BRE, which, again is very fun but hard to reverse engineer. Amit (creator) lost the source code years ago, but wrote up some notes here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Desi...
Funny, I just googled SRE/BRE to find the notes, and my last comment about it on HN was one of the top Google results... It's truly a lost art!
My first close friend group from high school were actually from BBS Meetups more than school buds. When we found a crossover it was really weird!
So much so that for several years I used a QB program I'd written to convert emails into QWK so I could use OLX to interact with emails. I'd reply using it and then convert my replies to plain text so I could send it off.
I still have taglines on all my emails.
Becoming a point (or even a private node) was the more hardcore option - running a mailer and tosser to exchange bundles of mail with your upstream node using protocols like WaZoo and the gloriously-named YooHoo/2U2.
BinkleyTerm was another favorite of mine, but I'm not sure of this version's lineage: https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/
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.
We spent so many nights with my friend (15 yo in 1996, the peak FidoNet) connecting to BBSes over phone modem, soaking up all the Fido lore, humour and lingo, dreaming of obtaining us a .point for ourselves somehow. To that end, we visited a number of local "sysopkas" and "pointovkas" (sysop/point parties), making friends with actual point owners who gathered in a local park to booze some and have fun.
What a blessed time it was! The future seemed spotless and bright...
Interestingly googling my numbers now and some echo "forums" I was part of I cannot find much... if the Russian segment was archived it's sure not indexed very well.
4:975/X !
Around 1995/96 the advent of commercial consumer Internet swept most BBSes away, which was unfortunate because the local, close-knit aspect of that early community was entirely lost.
It wasn't until later that clones existed and became popular, and then FidoNet dwarfed PunterNet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64
It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling desktop computer model of all time.
I used to run a board. Was beyond fun.
Exchanging messages with people on the other side of the world felt like magic at the time (even though it took many hours/days for a msg to round-trip)
I also run "Sudaka's BBS" based on Maximus/2, with many interactive "apps" I'd developed using Maximus' proprietary C-like language. Great high-school times.
I can still hear my parents complaining about my monopolizing the phone line every night :-)
A lot of current BBSes may have archives from the last 10 years or so. I know mine does: https://warensemble.com
I still think that some of those systems are easier to use than what we have now.
I miss the quality of EchoMail conversations with friends around the world. I even ended up moderating a few echoes myself after mods had moved on.
Good times.
I found an old listing for it. I don't think Peter still runs it :)
3:633/371 Micom CBCS
Has fewer replies than this!
But usenetarchives has had some enshittification happen.
This one still has some of the more fun files: http://textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/
There is also a Giganews dump on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/giganews And this one: https://archive.org/details/usenet-fido
Google stopped being useful for usenet a while ago but still has some if you can find it.
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.
