Discussion
zapp42: https://www.fidonet.org/
orf: https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+alive+todayhttps://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+archived+anywhere
grumpysysop: Get off my lawn!
Joe_Cool: Yes, but only what was mirrored to usenet: https://usenetarchives.com/groups.php?c=fidoBut 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-fidoGoogle stopped being useful for usenet a while ago but still has some if you can find it.
invaliduser: 2:320/104 represent!
david_iqlabs: I remember when a lot of online communities still felt small and human like that. People actually recognised usernames and conversations carried on over days rather than minutes.Feels like most modern platforms traded that for scale.
rozzie: FidoNet was a simply wonderful innovation, and it was a reflection of the creativity of its author - Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jenningsTom 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=21670035https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conferencehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunkhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute...https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto
andsoitis: > Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jenningsHuman version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
flyinghamster: As with so many old things, it's still alive, but it's down to the die-hards. I still miss it, though - I participated in Net 232 (Champaign-Urbana) for a while, then Net 115 in Chicago. We had some great gatherings back in those days, but in the Chicago area, the scene blew away pretty quickly when the internet opened up.
QuantumAtom: For those who want to learn more, there is a BBS documentary: https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary
thatxliner: Is this not a bot?
fidotron: Of course!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.
man8alexd: The ex-USSR segment of FIDONET became the largest in the world around 1995-1996. Internet access was rare and very expensive until around 2000.
bjourne: I do remember. :) Posted the same question ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932 The archives are almost completely gone and only a small fraction is available on internet. Perhaps some still exist on old harddrives - but I wouldn't count on it. Disk space wasn't cheap back then.
ghaff: Well, and hard drives fail and there weren't really great economical backup options at the time. In spite of being active on one BBS in particular, I basically have nothing digital saved from that time.
agentultra: I was a user of Fidonet and Fido mail back in the day before I had managed to score me an email address. That was before most people even knew that there was an Internet.
robertcope: I was more active on WWIVnet, but I definitely remember Fidonet! Good times.
andsoitis: Possible.Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe.https://keybase.io/rozziehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie
Cyphase: Sure looks legit based on the linked Keybase, Twitter, and GitHub.
tclancy: Their account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie.HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.
andsoitis: Right, which is why my first instinct was to “possible”.If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!
anovikov: 2:5019/19
lexszero_: Former 2:5034/16 here.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 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.
loloquwowndueo: the local communities we built around a handful of BBSes in Mexico City back in the mid-90s were incredibly close-knit. We’d meet in person a few times a year, and it resulted in life-long friendships, business partnerships and more. Fidonet allowed growing this even more - you didn’t have to connect to 5 different BBS every day to stay in contact with your friends, and the ability to communicate with foreign BBSes and the Internet was also magical and a nice perk us BBS operators could offer our users.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.
throw0101d: I also remember using the BlueWave offline mail reader:* 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)
BeetleB: I miss QWK. Best messaging format.I still have taglines on all my emails.
man8alexd: Just discovered that Debian still has ifmail and binkd packages.
Jemaclus: Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD), Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite, and Tradewars were the best.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!
roryirvine: BlueWave had that annoying "Ride the BlueWave!" default tagline, though. The progenitor of the plague of "Sent from my Blackberry/iphone" spamminess a few decades later...Becoming a point (or even a private node) was the more hardcore option - running a mailer and tosser, transferring bundles of mail to/from your upstream node using protocols like WaZoo and the gloriously-named YooHoo/2U2.
