
Ask HN: Remember FidoNet? - bjourne
It was all the rage among techies from the late 80&#x27;s to the mid
90&#x27;s. In those days, the World Wide Web didn&#x27;t exist and internet
access was much too expensive for most. But BBS:es did and with those
of them that were connected to FidoNet, you could participate in
discussions (like UseNet) and send FidoNets equivalent of email.<p>Phone bills were a problem for anyone using BBS:es, so FidoNet&#x27;s
hierarchial system was based on geography to ensure its users would
only have to make local phone calls to access it. For example, I was a
user node connected to a local BBS which in turn was connected to
South Net which in turn was connected to Region Sweden which in turn
was connected to Zone Europe. Cost minimization was very important
since it was all driven by hobbyists and no one got paid for it.<p>For me, it was the first time I networked. You could send FidoMail to
people all around the world and they would get the mail in a few
days. The delay in delivery was because of buffering; each node
in the network would only pull and push mail from and to their
upstream once or twice a day to save on phone bills.<p>But the discussions were the amazing part of the network. Being able
to read and participate in discussions with very smart people was very
fun. Most groups were computer-related, but other topics like ham
radio, religion, politics, sex and science were discussed too. There
must have been thousands of messages posted to the network everyday.<p>Anyways, I was trying to find the archives (spurred to it after
reading https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lars.ingebrigtsen.no&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;the-end-of-gmane&#x2F;) but
there are none! :( No one has bothered to archive FidoNet and now that
piece of computing history is lost forever. All the thousands of
messages I and many others wrote vanished in the aether.<p>Perhaps people have caches of messages from that era on their old hard
drives? It would be so cool if it was possible to put together an
archive of it! Perhaps not? Perhaps someday someone pulls the
plug on Hacker News site and then everything written here will be lost
too?
======
tired_man
I remember Fido. I briefly operated a dial-up BBS in the early 90's. Fido was
a great way to have globe spanning discussions with other having similar
interests.

There are some FidoNet archives floating around as torrents or as websites,
too. There isn't an all inclusive repository, though.

~~~
bjourne
Cool. Do you have links to the torrents? I can't find them.

------
bjourne
I'm a little saddened by the lack of responses. Maybe I'm getting older and a
whole generation has grown up after me and doesn't know about the "glory
days". :) Perhaps FidoNet is completely dead at this point and there is no way
to revive the old content.

