Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)

Posted by BruceEel 4 hours ago

Fidonet: Technology, Use, Tools, and History (1993)(www.fidonet.org)

86 points | 29 commentspage 2

drob518 1 hour ago|

Blast from the past.

specialist 3 hours ago||

Appreciate this share.

Whenever I hear about this new fangled AT protocol all the kids are jazzed about, I get all wistful for the BBS era.

FidoNet & PC-Relay were pretty fanfastic. For the time, obv.

Source: Was sysadmin for a hub.

icedchai 2 hours ago||

I loved that era. I was a BBSer from about 1988 through 1994 or so, on several systems with FidoNet and RelayNet / RIME. I also ran my own BBS for a while, eventually it had some Usenet newsgroups and Internet email through UUCP (anyone remember bang paths?)

What I miss most is the local community aspect. In my teens and early 20's I met several friends through BBSes.

BruceEel 3 hours ago||

Aye, they were. I also liked listening to this [1] (Jason Scott's) interview with Mark Herring.

[1] https://archive.org/details/20021102-bbs-herring/Mark+Herrin...

tobi_bsf 1 hour ago||

Was a great time, completely free of spam, ai slop and mostly even political stuff. the world is really developing backwards.

nickdothutton 1 hour ago||

I too remember. Where is the "FidoNet" of today?

tptacek 1 hour ago|

It's called Reddit.

ck2 1 hour ago||

one thing I distinctly remember is that when simultaneous two-way Zmodem transfers came out replacing Ymodem, it absolutely blew my mind

(previously all transfers, Xmodem/Ymodem, were one-way with CRC checks on each block slowing things down)

kylemaxwell 43 minutes ago||

My 8th-grade science project was doing a "statistical" analysis of X/Y/Zmodem transfers (and Kermit, I think?). It did well enough to get me to the county science fair here in Dallas, at least.

And yeah, Zmodem was mind-blowing for us.

bluGill 1 hour ago||

Ymodem-g (I think I remember that correctly) was faster than Zmodem - but if the CRC failed it aborted the whole send. Often I was willing to take the risk. (at 300 baud that adds up)

tycoon666 2 hours ago||

Best social network in history!

mcc1ane 3 hours ago|

(1993)