Ask HN: Remember FidoNet?

16 pointsby bjournevor 10 Jahren3 comments

It was all the rage among techies from the late 80's to the mid 90's. In those days, the World Wide Web didn'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.

Phone bills were a problem for anyone using BBS:es, so FidoNet'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.

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.

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.

Anyways, I was trying to find the archives (spurred to it after reading https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/) 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.

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?

4 comments

bjournevor 10 Jahren

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.

tired_manvor 10 Jahren

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.

bjournevor 10 Jahren

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

[deleted]vor 10 Jahren