Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?

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_jennings

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...

https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto

Last I checked it was still quite alive with quite a few BBS systems, though admittedly that was a few years ago.

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.

FidoNet was great fun. Despite finding it difficult to remember any useful numbers in my life (credit card, NI etc) I can still remember my FidoNet addresses from when I was a youngster.

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...

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.

For those who want to learn more, there is a BBS documentary: https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary

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)

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.

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.

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.

It became famous in Italy even among non-techies because it was involved in a large scale police operation in 1494 dubbed the "Fidonet crackdown".

https://www.wired.com/1994/08/hacker-crackdown-italian-style...

Episode 4 of the BBS documentary covers Fidonet and is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng0NE4lDP2U

https://www.fidonet.org/

I started on the MICOM (Microcomputer Club of Melbourne) BBS that was started and run by Peter Jetson around 1983/84, initially with a single phone line. It was home grown software, but eventually became part of Fidonet.

I found an old listing for it. I don't think Peter still runs it :)

3:633/371 Micom CBCS

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.

PunterNet, the C64 BBS by Steve Punter, was far more popular for a time. The C64 was the most sold computer of all time, and may still be.

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.

yes! don't remember my number, Zone 4 for sure (Argentina).

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 :-)

It was really popular in Ukraine in the late '90s, before Internet became widely available. [Former point of 2:4614/1]

Just discovered that Debian still has ifmail and binkd packages.

I'm too young to have used it myself but from what I know it was huge in Russia in the 90s.

Yes, remember. 2:5010/7 went live with the wind of change. Went dark when the winds changed.

I also remember the MausNet. This was a German speaking counterpart so to speak. Interestingly, I remember it from my Atari days, even though it was initially a Apple network (Münster Apple User Service).

I remember, and ran a node for a while. I think it is alive today in spirit through forums like this. The original needs and limitations that drove the creation of Fidonet have been dead for decades though.

I was more active on WWIVnet, but I definitely remember Fidonet! Good times.

2:320/104 represent!

Yes, but only what was mirrored to usenet: https://usenetarchives.com/groups.php?c=fido

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.

There surely must be some BBS backup tapes somewhere that at least contain some of the boards?

2:5019/19

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.

Get off my lawn!

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+alive+today

https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+archived+anywhere