
The History of Usenet and FidoNet - cfmcdonald
https://technicshistory.com/2020/06/25/the-era-of-fragmentation-part-4-the-anarchists/
======
notkaiho
I remember dialing up to a local BBS that was a FidoNet node. The discussion
forums/mailing lists had the same sense of urgency and intensity as today's
Twitter hashtags or subreddits.

The amount of misinformation was about equal, too. I learned a lot of outright
bullshit stated as fact reading those as a 12-year old. The difference is
there's now zero limit to that nonsense being spread...

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TheOtherHobbes
This was when a 14.4k modem was the last word in speed, and you were literally
paying your phone company by the minute for a connection. Public access to
Usenet required access through an ISP, who would also charge - separately - by
the minute.

Modems were very optional, because not everyone had that kind of money.

At 14.4k it takes maybe 10 seconds to download a JPEG, and tens of minutes to
hours to download a low-res video clip.

Neither Usenet nor Fidonet had anything like a browser. Files had to be
converted to ASCII for upload, often in parts, and then glued back together
and converted to the original format manually using various helper
applications.

It was still exciting and fun though.

~~~
bluGill
2400 baud was the gold standard. 9600 and then 14.4k came latter. I stuck on
300 baud for a while and rejoyced when I got a 1200 baud modem for a birthday
- then lightning took it out...

Usenet was reading was free via the local university unsecured dial-in (not
ppp just a terminal that would telnet into any computer you knew of) , but
without an email address you couldn't do much so I didn't spend much time
there. Fido and the other local bbs systems provides free accounts that made
the whole thing useful.

Then the web hit and you could find useful things on the internet. It was all
downhill from there for Usenet.

~~~
ncrmro
I’m starting to work on microcontrollers and born in the 90s. Upload at like
115200 i believe and just like dang we’ve come a long way.

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andrewshadura
The article completely fails to mention that in Eastern Europe FidoNet existed
and was popular well until mid-00's, and that a rather small community in
Russia still exists to this day.

~~~
anthk
Usenet too, at least for programmers and IF/Nethack players.

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bbarnett
And yet none speak for punternet. Even wikipedia doesn't mention it here:

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

Yet, in the 300 baud days, before PC clones became numerous, when the C64 was
the most sold PC on the planet, PunterBBS, and PunterNET was worldwide.

I ran such a BBS, on a C64 with two of these:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571)

At the time, punternet offered everything fidonet did. But... time passes....

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_sbrk
I miss BlueWave offline mail reader...

nn just didn't compare when I got to University. irc was and still is
fantastic.

~~~
mrlonglong
Fossil driver, QWK reader and tosser and you're set :-)

~~~
ruslan
uucp, uucico, tin and you are set. ;)

~~~
ruslan
rz@skyrocket:~ % man uucico

No manual entry for uucico

rz@skyrocket:~ % uname -a

FreeBSD skyrocket 9.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE #1: Fri Nov 27 20:28:19 UTC
2015 root@skyrocket:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SKYROCKET amd64

Hopefully cu is till there.

------
wenbin
Some Chinese tech entrepreneurs were FidoNet users in 1990s, e.g.,Ma Huateng
(Tecnent Founder & CEO), Ding Lei (NetEase Founder & CEO), Lei Jun (Xiaomi
Founder & CEO)...

~~~
ruslan
ex 2:5077/7 here.

Almost any tech guy in early 90s was a Fidonet or Usenet user. That was the
only mean of communication and source of technical information available
worldwide, an informational Klondike for programmers, electronics engineers,
for all kind of hobbyists. Personally, I can say that Fidonet had a
significant impact on my career and on whole my life. I was a node running
multiline BBS somewhere in the middle of Siberia in 90th. It was a technical
challenge, it tought me to deal with and solve many technical and
organisational issues. I learnt and studied TCP/IP by reading Fidonet echos
(aka Usenet groups) and tought myself to deploy IP networks (including DNS)
not having IP access because there was not any in my place at that time. I
learnt to use OS/2, then FreeBSD. And there was no Google to ask.
Participating in echos gave me a good warm feeling of the big world at my
fingertips.

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simonblack
I remember using UUCP to link the half-dozen or so nodes of our little local
net back 1991 (or thereabouts).

One of our members shared an excited piece of information: "Hey, wow! I just
heard there's a whole million nodes on the Net."

The Net back then was Usenet, email, and (sometimes) ftp.

That new-fangled WWW thing was just a strange curiosity. It would never take
off anyway, how would you know what websites were around? And anyway, hour-
long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive.

~~~
tialaramex
> And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively
> expensive.

I firmly believe Always On made more difference than the Broadband bandwidth
most users got at the same time.

My first student household had 24/7 Internet access at modem speeds, 56kbps
(at best) shared between half a dozen people. But even though that's scarcely
any bandwidth (my last student house was 2Mbps DSL shared between two people
for comparison) the fact it's always there changed how we used it compared to
people with conventional dial-up.

~~~
simonblack
When I first got Always On, it still took me several weeks before I wasn't
twitchy enough to actually leave it on. Those years of 30 hours of monthly
connection quotas died hard.

It was a bit of a shock to the system again, when in 2011 I spent 8 months
travelling in France with 2gig/month (60mb/day) quotas again.

------
anthk
There is a Gopher server with a Fidonet mirror, I can't find it.

EDIT: gopher://synchro.net

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anticsapp
I hope this isn't off topic. I've been interested in perusing Usenet groups
from the 80s like rec.music -- I swear ten years ago this was possible. I
can't figure out how to do it now. Did the massive load of binaries kill off
archival efforts? I can't find a search engine for Usenet anywhere. I'm just
interested in plan text conversations.

~~~
cfmcdonald
Google still has an archive, e.g.
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.music.misc](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.music.misc)

I believe it's based on the data they bought from Deja back in 2001
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups))

------
anthk
Also, I forgot:

Run XTerm with the 10x20 fixed font, then:

    
    
              TERM=ansi telnet cvs.synchro.net
    

Enjoy.

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082349872349872
related: [http://olduse.net](http://olduse.net)

