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...

It's somewhat alive. I still run a BBS and am the NC (net coordinator) for Wisconsin/Minnesota/North and South Dakota. (an area that used to be considered a "Region" back around the turn of the millennium). My FidoNet address is: 1:154/30 (and also 1:154/0)

There are 9 FidoNet nodes in my net. (154) I added 2 new ones within the last month or so.

My BBS is accessible at: https://warensemble.com It can also be accessed via SSH, Telnet, and possibly dialup but the program that handles my modem often checks out on me without warning (usually after a dropped call, which happens far too often over a VOIP line)

The joke is that Fidonet will eventually just be 2 sysops sending netmail back and forth to each other, where they argue about the policies and methods of how that mail is sent.

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...

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)

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.

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.

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

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.

Fidonet was really big in Russia when the internet was too expensive for many people, and some made it tongue in cheek matter of principle that Fidonet is anyway superior. I remember (in the late 90ies/early aughts) standing around with a bunch of people near a subway station before an in-person gathering (of Fidonet users), everybody discussing computer stuff. An older passerby asked us "Hey guys, so are you like, supporters of the Internet?" (sounded just as weird in Russian too), and after a pause someone responded "No! We oppose the Internet! The only use of the Internet is to download drivers!"

Interestingly googling my numbers now and some echo "forums" I was part of I cannot find much... if the Russian segment was archived it's sure not indexed very well.

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.

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).

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 :-)

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.

I still have my node address memorized. The very late 1980s and mid 90s were the very best era for the vibe of hobbyist computing. Amazing ANSI art and text driven menus still fill my heart with joy.

I still think that some of those systems are easier to use than what we have now.

I miss the quality of EchoMail conversations with friends around the world. I even ended up moderating a few echoes myself after mods had moved on.

Good times.

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

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

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

Given the high cost of professional textbooks and my modest means as a youngster, FidoNet and BBS provided me with access to a wealth of knowledge, software, and friendly expertise. Sometimes the first dreams of something new are the most vivid.

Huh, 10 years ago: "Ask HN: Remember FidoNet?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932

Has fewer replies than this!

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.

Legend of the Red Dragon (LoRD), Solar Realms Elite and Barren Realms Elite, and Tradewars were the best.

When I want to learn a new programming language, I always try to recreate Tradewars in it as a language. I know Tradewars like the back of my hand, so it allows me to focus on the nuances of the language while I build it. Such a fun project. The only thing I never quite figured out were the economics mechanics (it technically works, but it's a bit more predictable than TW2002 has in practice) and the Big Bang algorithm (I came up with my own, it's fine, but it doesn't have quite the same feel to it).

Less often, I'll try to create SRE/BRE, which, again is very fun but hard to reverse engineer. Amit (creator) lost the source code years ago, but wrote up some notes here: http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Articles/SRE-Desi...

Funny, I just googled SRE/BRE to find the notes, and my last comment about it on HN was one of the top Google results... It's truly a lost art!

I miss QWK. Best messaging format.

So much so that for several years I used a QB program I'd written to convert emails into QWK so I could use OLX to interact with emails. I'd reply using it and then convert my replies to plain text so I could send it off.

I still have taglines on all my emails.

BlueWave had that annoying "Ride the BlueWave!" default tagline, though. It might have been the progenitor of the plague of "Sent from my Blackberry/iphone" spamminess a few decades later...

Becoming a point (or even a private node) was the more hardcore option - running a mailer and tosser to exchange bundles of mail with your upstream node using protocols like WaZoo and the gloriously-named YooHoo/2U2.

I was a big fan of msged on my Net 115 point. https://github.com/jrnutt/msged

BinkleyTerm was another favorite of mine, but I'm not sure of this version's lineage: https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/