
History of Fidonet (1993) - unilynx
http://www.olografix.org/gubi/estate/archivio/fido/fido.htm
======
richard_todd
It was chilling to read the last section (starting “This was pretty cool ...
for a while ...“). The network got big enough that people who “had nothing to
do with the design, creation or maintenance of the FidoNet software” started
asserting control over how the project was run, and forming committees.
Shortly after, it sounds like political struggles led to forks and
disillusioned members.

When I think about all the code-of-conduct/governance/etc advocacy that comes
from outside the core of today’s big projects, it’s hard not to worry about
the similarities.

~~~
dleslie
Reminds me of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

> In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy
> itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the
> bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and
> sometimes are eliminated entirely.

~~~
azinman2
Sounds a lot like US government politics today, sadly.

~~~
mgrennan
Funny you say that. When I was sending compressed FidoNet Trafic (Looking like
encryption) to Soviet block countries I got a knock on my door from men in
black suits (FBI) asking me what I was doing?

------
harrigan
BBS: The Documentary Part 4
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cm6EFYktRQ))
has some great interviews with Tom Jennings & co. on the beginnings, growth
and decline of Fidonet.

"It just runs in spite of the idiots." (Tom Jennings)

~~~
rsync
Highly recommend this documentary and, especially, the entire episode devoted
to Fidonet.

For those that don't know, the BBS Documentary is something like 6 DVDs and
has _hours_ of well produced and documented material and interviews.

~~~
ghaff
Yes. A lot of pretty rare information. BBSing existed as a relatively niche
mostly hobbyist community that was largely both decentralized and disjoint
from the early, pre-mainstream Internet.

As a result, with a few exceptions like Jason Scott's textfiles, there was
relatively little archived documentation/stories/archives about BBSs at the
time and very little of that has survived. (BBSs pretty much all got shutdown
at some point and there's very saved from discussions, especially outside of
the relays.)

------
ggm
It does me no credit but I feel I must admit throughout the eighties and
nineties many of my fellow sysadmins and I were not kind about Fido and like
BBS, from our extremely privileged and funded dialup inter-uni UUCP and
subsequently TCP/IP world view, it was already dead. These kinds of cultural
snobbery do us no credit, and it's clear that nicer and wiser heads than mine
ran cross connects and it became what John Quartermain called "the matrix"
long before the movie.

I was an upstream of one or two BBS for a few years, gatewaying Usenet news
and email. We treated them exactly like the UUCP and ACSnet feeds, and the
military over x.25 and OSI x.400 mail, but we didn't always feel very
charitable towards them.

I now respect this kind of self organised bootstrapping behaviour much more.

------
gtirloni
This brings back so many good memories. Getting a message from someone on the
other side of the world and thinking "are you kidding me?". This was back in
'94 and this document about Fidonet's beginnings was written in '85\. It just
goes to show how far behind my country was.

~~~
huhtenberg
Cheers to that. I suspect that you may still be particularly fond of Zyxel
modems too :)

~~~
berbec
Courier HST or death

~~~
ananonymoususer
Couriers were great, but not as good as Hayes. Of course the Hayes modems cost
twice as much so everyone bought the USR modems instead.

~~~
EricE
Pshaw - I still have my Supra 14.4, 28.8 and 56 modems. Use 'em to feed fax
servers since that's about the only real use for modems still. Stacked on top
of each other with their displays rotating... the memories!

~~~
azinman2
Don’t forget US Robotics we’re really the kings, always faster with their not-
yet-standards.

Meanwhile I was doing pretty well with my Spectrum Peripherals 14.4k before I
got my fancy Zoom 56k...

~~~
tudorw
I'll be buried next to my PSION Gold Card :)

------
magoon
Running a FidoNet-connected BBS meant I had direct access to read every
EchoMail group I could subscribe my BBS to. At the time it was a great source
of real, insightful written conversation. Because the readers were text-based,
and it was all on my hard drive, I could consume postings at such great speed.
(spacebar, spacebar, spacebar...)

The memories.

~~~
throw0101a
> _Because the readers were text-based, and it was all on my hard drive, I
> could consume postings at such great speed._

You didn't have to run a BBS to do this. Using an offline mail reader like
Blue Wave [1] and downloading QWK files [2] allowed anyone to do it—and helped
keep the lines, as downloading was (relatively) quick compared to reading
'online'.

I initially got "on" Usenet by downloading SOUP files from a local free-net
[3].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave_(mail_reader)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Wave_\(mail_reader\))

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_\(file_format\))

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-
net](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-net)

~~~
BeetleB
Those offline mail readers were awesome - I preferred OLX.

In fact, when I finally got email, I wrote a QB program to convert my inbox to
QWK format. I would then use OLX to read/reply to emails. I don't recall, but
I probably used OLX's Save As to store my replies to text files which I then
uploaded to my online mail server.

I used OLX for emails until at least 1999.

~~~
throw0101a
> _I used OLX for emails until at least 1999._

Seems you can still get it:

* [http://www.santronics.com/products/olx/index.php](http://www.santronics.com/products/olx/index.php)

------
NelsonMinar
After FidoNet Tom Jennings has gone on to have a long and fascinating career
mixing art and technology, with a good side dose of car hacking and queer
activism. His current website is at [http://sr-ix.com/](http://sr-ix.com/)

~~~
DonHopkins
Indeed! It's hard to describe how influential and wide-ranging his career has
been, but I'll try:

Besides pioneering FidoNet, Tom Jennings also started another early ISP in
1992 originally running out of John Gilmore's basement in San Francisco called
TLG: The Little Garden, named after a Chinese food restaurant in Palo Alto
that was popular with techies:

[https://ask.metafilter.com/266181/Ill-take-Palo-Alto-in-
the-...](https://ask.metafilter.com/266181/Ill-take-Palo-Alto-in-the-
early-90s-Alex)

John Gilmore had a T1 line to his house in the Haight, and TLG customers (I
mean the ISP, not the restaurant) would pay for their modem and a phone line
to be installed, and for their monthly phone bill and share of the T1 line.
Tom did all the wiring in the basement, which was a work of art that really
impressed the technician from the phone company when he came over to install
more lines. John said they charged the minimum amount necessary in order to
set a baseline that other ISPs would eventually have to compete with, at a
time when nobody else would sell you a cheap fast connection to the internet.

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/index.html)

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/TLG.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/TLG/TLG.html)

[https://www.wired.com/1996/04/jennings/](https://www.wired.com/1996/04/jennings/)

>There's a kind of cheap theatric irony in the fact that Jennings first took
control of The Little Garden (TLG), a San Francisco provider of Internet
access, when he was on food stamps; yet now that TLG has more success than he
and his staff can keep up with, he's looking for an exit play, to sell out. He
wants to stop working the entrepreneur's 90-hour weeks and is talking about
buying a piece of safe, income-generating commercial real estate.

[http://www.toad.com/gnu/](http://www.toad.com/gnu/)

>The Little Garden (with John Romkey, David Henkel-Wallace, and Steve Crocker)

>A medium-sized Internet Service Provider in the San Francisco Bay Area. now
merged into Verio. We mostly sold T1 and 56K Internet connections to
businesses. We were distinguished from many other early commercial providers
by our common-carrier attitude: "You are free to resell the service that we
provide to you, and we will not censor it." This enabled a whole crop of
smaller resellers in various locales to buy from us and offer other services
to the public (like modem-based Internet connections). These resellers
contributed to our volume of Internet traffic, and enabled us to provide
higher quality service at lower prices. TLGnet was sold to Best Internet
Communications in July, 1996, and my active involvement in it ended. (Best was
then bought by Hiway Technologies, which was then bought by Verio.)

You can see more of Tom's elegant technological artwork on his site here:

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/PROJECTS/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/PROJECTS/index.html)

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/OBJECTS/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/OBJECTS/index.html)

He co-founded a skateboarder's rights group called Shred of Dignity, which
fought against San Francisco city hall and won.

[http://gimmesomethingbetter.com/excerpts/shred-of-
dignity](http://gimmesomethingbetter.com/excerpts/shred-of-dignity)

>Tom Jennings: Shred of Dignity started out life as Duke Crestfield and Shawn
Ford flyering to get support to stop a city-wide ban of skateboarding in San
Francisco.

>Shawn Ford: I found this article about the proposed skateboarding ban. I was
probably 17 or 18 and I had never been politically active. I talked to my
skate friends, but they were kind of apathetic. Fucking hippies, you know? For
me, the skateboard was a necessity.

>Tom Jennings: Duke made up the name, as a triple-entendre/pun, originally to
be a gay skateboarders group. No, I won’t explain it.

>Shawn Ford: Duke was in his 20s and had already been politically active, so
he set it up and we started collecting signatures. We met all these kids who
had never been politically active, and Duke showed everybody what to do. Tom
Jennings put down some money for photocopying, and within a week or two, we
were taking ramps to the park and having BBQs and meetings, all with the
intention of fighting this thing at City Hall.

>Tom Jennings: We overturned the ban with some of Duke’s political/theatrical
maneuvers.

Tom Jennings also published a gay queer anarchist skater zine called
"Homocore", which spawned a punk subculture offshoot called "Queercore", and
led to Riot Grrrl.

[http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/HOMOCORE/index.html](http://www.worldpowersystems.com/ARCHIVE/HOMOCORE/index.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homocore_(zine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homocore_\(zine\))

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queercore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queercore)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Grrrl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Grrrl)

~~~
0x445442
I saw a somewhat recent interview with Jennings where he called Silicon Valley
a "cult of money" now. This struck me as such a succinct label that captures
the essence of the current state of things on so many levels.

------
sedatk
Turkey had its own FidoNet-style network called HitNet (with the prefix "8:"
instead of "1:") back in the 90’s. It had about 400 active users nationwide. I
had even written an offline mail reader software compatible with QWK and
BlueWave: [https://github.com/ssg/wolverine](https://github.com/ssg/wolverine)

~~~
throw0101a
> _Turkey had its own FidoNet-style network called HitNet (with the prefix
> "8:" instead of "1:") back in the 90’s._

Given that FidoNet only went up to Zone 6, they could just leverage the same
technical standards:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Geographical_structure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet#Geographical_structure)

I remember there being other "nets", but cannot for the life of me remember
their names.

------
ztjio
FidoNet (and similars, like WWIVnet) directly led to my career today which is
largely centered around distributed data systems (and how the data flows
around them.)

If I hadn't been fascinated with projects like reimplementing WWIV's network
protocol to bridge it to my FIDONet supporting BBS, or implementing IEMSI and
other things surrounding echomail/etc. I don't think I'd have developed the
necessary interest to become a career software engineer, especially not in
this space.

I really miss that moment in tech. The social connections were still somewhat
on a "natural" scale and showed hope for improving the world instead of
clearly damning it. I appreciate many other improvements that have happened,
don't think I truly pine for those times overall. But the mass open social
networks of now are truly ruining society and being involved in progressing
this kind of communication makes me feel at fault, if even only for an
infinitesimally small amount.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
in 1992..1996 FidoNet was almost the only means of connecting with the world
in Russia. I think I can still determine the baud rate of the connection by
how it sounds.

~~~
YarickR2
I was able to whistle dialtone and handshake precisely enough for nearby modem
to report CONNECT 300/NONE .

------
MiscIdeaMaker99
My BBS was up from about 1991 to 1995 or so. I still have all of my data. It
lasted until I graduated high school, which was at about the same time that I
got a dail-up shell account from a friend, which allowed me to directly access
the Internet. That changed everything.

Eventually, that Spring, I installed Windows 3.1 specifically so that I could
use Netscape, which was at version 1.1 at the time.

FidoNet was a big part of why I ran that board, and it was my gateway to the
world in the early 90s. I met so many people that way.

------
azinman2
Nostalgia dialed to 11 for me (pun intended). I missed these “simpler times,”
where the technology world was filled with those who built and cared about it,
filled with blind optimism. I grew up in SF and started attending 2600
meetings with Adrian Lamo at age 12 (RIP). It’s unbelievable looking back on
all of this how accepting adults were of my youth and were so willing to chat
with me and give me equipment, etc despite my young age. I first was on BBSes
about age 7!

Now the same people who used to make fun of me for my computer interests are
working for Twitter. How the world changes once there’s money and mainstream
success in something. I can’t help but feel slightly bitter about it,
especially as I see all of the negativity now spreading across technology what
with the great firewall, misinformation, and all.

------
EricE
Net209 - those were the days. Of course having a local call to the Western
Star didn't hurt either ;-)

Sysop meetings at Shakey's Pizza - nothing beats in person meet ups!

EDIT: It just dawned on me - how amazing is it that now that long distance
calls are generally free (at least here in the US) that lots of people don't
get the significance of "local call". What at time.

~~~
throw0101a
(Zone 1) Net250, Toronto, Canada, checking in.

> _Net209_

Las Vegas?

* [https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/hos...](https://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena/reference/net-directory/host-tables/FIDONet-Hosts.txt)

~~~
EricE
>Las Vegas?

Yup! I wonder what happened to Dave James and some of the other heavyweights
from the local sysops. A few still have boards that are Internet accessible. I
hadn't thought about it for years now but my first Intel PC was a cast off
from Dave's bbs - a 33 MHz 386DX that had DIP and SIMM memory - 4MB of each. A
beast back in those days. Was in a AT case - I still miss the big red on/off
switch in the back right corner of the AT cases. Such a satisfying thunk when
you turned the machine on or off.

------
gog
Brings back memories.

My first ever email was sent via a local BBS and relayed via Fidonet to the
authors of WinZIP, asking them if they plan to support creating multispan arj
archives on disk first so I can copy them and FDDs and be able to copy again a
single failed archive and not restart the whole process from scratch if for
some reason one of the drives had an error.

------
gravitas
What I remember of my '94 sysop kit: 486/dx2-66, OS/2 (3.1?), Synchronicty,
MailGate and XeniaMailer (I ran a fido <=> uucp node) and something I'm
forgetting I'm sure.

~~~
throw0101a
> _OS /2 (3.1?)_

DESQview and QEMM on DOS was also popular. It wasn't fully multi-taking, but
it worked quite well.

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview)

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMM)

You also had to have a COM port that was connected to a 16550A UART, often
done via a serial add-in card, because it had a whopping 16 byte buffer:

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART#The_16550_FIFO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16550_UART#The_16550_FIFO)

------
mgrennan
If you like this document you should watch the documentary.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBS:_The_Documentary)

During this time I was the REGION 9 cordionar for Fidonet and latter to become
the president of IFNA.

I agree Fidonet suffered from politics from the first meeting in Coloradio
Springs. As a software development project and public resource it was
fasinating to see it work. Even the side stories should be told. SeaDog and
ARC data compression (Later to become ZIP). Xmodem and SLIP are also tied into
these stories.

I don't miss the $800 dolar phone bills I plaid for myself or the politics. I
do miss the people.

My personal contribution was "The Communicator" modem program (Freeware AKA
Open Source) and the inspration for ProComm.

------
Andrew_nenakhov
What I miss most from those days is strict quoting code:

АN>> this was the original message

SG> first reply, text _below_ the quotation

With more levels, original initials were preserved, quotes we're kept at
necessary minimum, and email correspondence was very organized. Not the mess
we have now with replies at the top and the rest of all thread below

~~~
u801e
I spent over a decade on usenet and only saw that convention used a handful of
times. Most of the time, clients would just use multiple > or | symbols to
indicate quoting level without any initials.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
Just opened a random echo conference archive [1], and thistype of quoting is
everywhere. Maybe it's the regional thing, of course, or just because everyone
used GoldEd editor, which supported such quotes very well.

[1]
[http://www.fandom.ru/fido/ru_fantasy/text/303.htm](http://www.fandom.ru/fido/ru_fantasy/text/303.htm)

------
pgrote
Fidonet and many of the other message networks based on another standard, QWK,
were awesome. One of the better things was to be part of the collective you
had to prove you set up your BBS to handle the proper packet transfers:

"This is why node numbers aren't given out "word of mouth", or at other sysops
request. It has to be done directly, as a test."

I remember struggling getting the old WWIV software to handle the message
transfers of Fido, but when it finally worked it felt like I cracked the
world.

Of course, there were elitists on the Fido side that sneered at WWIV BBSes,
but that is another story. lol

------
Fjolsvith
Fidonet still operates, along with many other FTN networks, on BBS's still run
by sysops.

Check out the Telnet BBS Guide:

Https://www.telnetbbsguide.com

------
henrikschroder
> Fido 51 is an extremely busy system; they receive 125 messages a week
> through FidoNet alone, so please be patient.

Holy crap how the times have changed.

------
jsjohnst
Man talk about flash from the past. My MajorBBS based BBS was on Fidonet from
1993-1994 before I switched over to being a dialup ISP.

The guy who co-ran the BBS with me leaked our serial number after we had a
falling out. Was “fun” trying to get support from Galacticomm after that,
despite having the original manuals with the serial number printed on it as
proof I really owned it.

~~~
rsync
nwgeegd9j ?

~~~
jsjohnst
Nope, that’s another one that started showing up online a few years later.

------
herohamp
For the people like myself who do not know what Fidonet is, and just want to
read the comments.

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between
bulletin board systems (BBSes). It uses a store-and-forward system to exchange
private (email) and public (forum) messages between the BBSes in the network,
as well as other files and protocols in some cases.

\- Wikipedia

------
unfocused
I remember connecting to Fidonet back in 1994ish in Ottawa and asking somebody
why we don't have Fiber optic cables in my city. I was still in high school
and had no idea what I was doing. I did have a neighbourhood friend though
that ran a "Renegade" BBS. Our list of BBSs were in the back of MONiTOR
magazine. Wow. So many memories!

~~~
kitteh
Renegade as in the bbs software?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_(BBS)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renegade_\(BBS\))

------
reuven
I have lots of good memories of FidoNet. I was a teenager with a modem,
computer, and lots of curiosity. I had been using BBSes for a few years, but
they were all local to me, dialing up to various numbers where I lived (Long
Island, New York).

The idea that I could connect not just to people on a local system, but with
others around the world, was just amazing.

I wasn't a part of the technical infrastructure, and I clearly missed out on a
lot of the politics and discussion... but I had lots of good discussions with
others, and even contributed a few articles to FidoNews back in the day. The
fact that they were willing to let a teenager write for them was extremely
encouraging for me.

Thanks to all of the FidoNet folks for the amazing stuff that they did, and
for giving me a taste of an online community before using the Internet when I
started college.

------
andrewshadura
I used Fidonet in Belarus just before the sunset, so to say, from 2004 to 2009
or so. It was very interesting experience.

------
djabatt
I started on Wildcat BBS from Mustang and bumped into FidoNet in the early
90's. This was all very decentralized perhaps the crypto-kiddies can glean
some intel from the up/downs from this FidoNet story.

------
alor
I've always struggled to understand how Fidonet (and BBSes) was different to
Usenet.

From what I gathered, Usenet was a decentralised network from the start,
whereas BBSes were distinct communities and Fidonet was a solution to connect
these communities together. I believe Usenet also runs on TCP/IP, unlike BBSes
which you dialed into.

Can anyone shed some light on the above?

~~~
u801e
This was posted on HN several days ago:

[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.htm...](https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/2019-11/2019-11-14.html)

Usenet didn't start out by running over TCP/IP.

------
myth_drannon
[https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...](https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index.html)
some of Fidonet messages collection

------
dang
Surprisingly, the only previous thread seems to be this one from 2016, which
laments its own lack of responses:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932)

Hopefully the current one is making up for it.

------
JoeMayoBot
Good times. I operated a Renegade BBS in OKC, specializing in AI, but still
consuming everything I could from FidoNet. Didn't the first versions of Linux
(before it was called Linux) distribute over FidoNet?

------
jrochkind1
> Fido 51 is an extremely busy system; they receive 125 messages a week
> through FidoNet alone, so please be patient.

cute.

------
anthk
I wasn't net-aware with Fidonet but I grasped some late Usenet in ~2001-2003.
I liked it a lot.

