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abc123abc123 44 minutes ago [-]
It is the truth. The fact that it took some effort to get on there was a great filter of people.
I sometimes think there will be a renaissance for Fidonet-like networks, when our politicians have banned encryption, implemented complete surveillance and generally destroyed the internet.
It would be a great irony, if we then went back to the networks of our childhood in order to be free.
I guess the other option might be i2p or something similar, but that is probably too easily accessible to remain free when the authoritarians in power lock down the internet.
sedatk 19 hours ago [-]
There was a FidoNet clone in Turkey called HitNet (short for “Hi Türkiye Net”). Its node addresses were like “8:103/119”.
İ developed a Netmail server for Hitnet called HitBase in 1995 or so. It allowed people to discover others around their city to meet. Possibly the earliest thing that resembles Facebook. Similarly, it was a privacy nightmare too, luckily short-lived.
HitNet introduced me to great people some of whom I still see today. It was such a tight-knit friendly community.
The advent of Internet killed it but some communities are still active on other platforms.
sedatk 15 hours ago [-]
Forgot to add, I also developed a BlueWave-compatible offline-reader called Wolverine that worked for all Fido-style networks: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine
I completely forgot about Wolverine, but you've reminded me I was using that back in the day to read my mail from Fidonet point (as well as Bluewave).
mrandish 13 hours ago [-]
Circa 1985, I ran a BBS for my computer club and when a Fidonet feature was offered in the software I activated it and figured out how to connect to a larger relay BBS in my area code. It was really magical in those toll-call days to see messages that had relayed across the entire country in just a couple days - entirely FOR FREE. It was like a dial-up modem Pony Express! This was especially amazing for us 8-bit micro hobbyists in the early and mid-80s who were scratching out an isolated existence in the wild wastelands of ad hoc user's groups and BBS' far beyond the gated walls of universities, government and big corp IT depts - we'd never even seen early Usenet!
I lived near Los Angeles at the time and still remember meeting some guys in New York City entirely via free FidoNet messages. A few months later, for other reasons, I happened to make my first ever trip to New York and actually met up with those Fidonet friends and hung out with them. Good times.
ex-aws-dude 16 hours ago [-]
Too young to have used it but I watched the BBS documentary recently and what surprised me was how much stuff was already possible pre-internet
A lot of stuff I would typically associate with the internet like pirating, forums, mail, large scale multiplayer games actually predates it
JdeBP 14 hours ago [-]
Pre-World Wide Web, strictly, as the Internet pre-dated Fidonet by some years. The Internet almost, but not quite, preceded Teletext.
But yes, people did all of that many years before it was done on the World Wide Web.
(There's some complexity as to whether Usenet was an Internet thing early on, as it did the whole dial-up-over-PSTN thing, that Fidonet did, quite a lot before settling on mainly NNTP.)
More so that you think. Piracy was not actually most of it. There was a whole thriving shareware system, which in Fidonet was done via FREQs. Tens of thousands of nodes pushing archived shareware softwares, many long since forgotten, around the globe.
NuSkooler 20 hours ago [-]
For those interested, FidoNet and "Alt nets" such as fsxNet are still going and active!
t43562 18 hours ago [-]
5:7211/1.27 here - though I think this address is long long gone. I'm gobsmacked that I can remember it. :-)
We got fidonet in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. It was utterly revolutionary for us - more than the internet that came later really. For the first time we could communicate with my two brothers overseas without paying for extremely exorbitant international telephone calls that lasted a couple of minutes at best.
Our modem was 2400bps (8-N-1 IIRC). We used the zmodem protocol. It was after I learned about computers but I learned a HUGE amount from this about protocols etc. Our phone system was terrible so error correction etc were of great importance. Working out how to dial slowly was also important for our terrible phone exchanges.
It let me keep in touch with my pal, K, who emigrated to South Africa and as a result he ended up sending me 21 1.2MB floppy disks with SLS Linux on them and kernel 0.99 (I think). The journey began! :-)
liotier 2 hours ago [-]
In Harare in 1998, I remember the pleasant surprise of finding a good "internet café" in some downtown office building... Was Fidonet still active in Zimbabwe at that time, or had Internet access supplanted it already ?
iberator 11 hours ago [-]
cool story :)
egorfine 19 hours ago [-]
2:463/1161 here. Nostalgia is strong with this one.
ricudis 11 minutes ago [-]
2:410/3 here. These were some of the best days!
influx 18 hours ago [-]
4:920/35 here :)
18 hours ago [-]
czw2 17 hours ago [-]
2:5058/35 :)
vzaliva 18 hours ago [-]
2:463/80
sixothree 10 hours ago [-]
1:396/78
egorfine 18 hours ago [-]
Ого! Обнял-поднял!:)
18 hours ago [-]
15 hours ago [-]
rnxrx 9 hours ago [-]
99:9008/206 / 1:137/206
9 hours ago [-]
mcfist 13 hours ago [-]
привет от 2:464 :)
egorfine 12 hours ago [-]
Агонь! Харьков <3
reconnecting 18 hours ago [-]
Sysop?
egorfine 16 hours ago [-]
Yell for sysop!
maximilianburke 15 hours ago [-]
formerly 1:153/7015 here
reconnecting 15 hours ago [-]
Guys, I don't get it.
Were you all node sysops, or did your region just not have that last part — the point?
Zone:Net/Node.Point
egorfine 14 hours ago [-]
I have had points, like 2:463/702.160 and then 2:463/131.160
But then later I became a Boss and got my own Node address 2:463/1161
rnxrx 8 hours ago [-]
I always knew the "point" was there, but never saw it actually used in my travels (..which finished in '90 or '91). I seem to recall the node lists at some point didn't have decimals, but perhaps my recollection is inaccurate.
czw2 14 hours ago [-]
I started as a point but after couple of years I become a node with a few points (mainly friends and family).
18 hours ago [-]
dsrtslnd23 19 hours ago [-]
I feel like polling mail 30+ years ago on ISDN + zipped mail file from my fido net node was faster than IMAP on my 1 gbit connection now.
pgrote 20 hours ago [-]
Respected the process for getting on Fidonet. You had to figure it out, configure it properly and prove you were ready to go before you got a node number. No hand holding. Frontdoor and national mail hour.
nandomrumber 20 hours ago [-]
You didn’t need to be a node to be on Fidonet.
drillsteps5 19 hours ago [-]
Even if you were a "point" (an endpoint assigned to the node) you still had to set up the software and (in the mid-to-late 90s at least) set up a modem to call your node to upload/download. And sometimes you had to set up repeated dialing until you got through because the node could be busy (some nodes doubled as BBSs), or connection could be bad and it'd had to retry etc. Wasn't an easy task, so it served as a sort of a filter so that most people on there were geeks.
Later on of course some nodes started distributing over the Internet so setting up a node became much easier (and I think there was a way for the node to allow multiple users read/write without even setting up a node/point at all).
nandomrumber 15 hours ago [-]
You didn’t even need to need a point to be on Fidonet.
yummybear 18 hours ago [-]
I have very fond memories of fidonet: discussions, friends made, parties held. I wish i was back there :)
thesuitonym 14 hours ago [-]
So go back. It's still there, just waiting for you!
reconnecting 18 hours ago [-]
FidoNet was my first network. I still remember the sysops and the parties.
An interesting aspect is that it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return, so it was a privilege to have your own FidoNet address.
rendx 15 hours ago [-]
> it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return
Huh? Not when I joined in my region. I didn't have to provide anything.
I was 14, but the BBS owner and mostly old guy heavy metal user base only found out when I later showed up at their annual user group meeting - and we had lots of fun (and drinks) together! They even took me clubbing later with a fake ID, and I woke up heavily wasted in the BBS owner's student apartment and we had microwaved frozen pizza together. Fun times.
reconnecting 15 hours ago [-]
Similar situation, except they know from the beginning that I'm 14, and they drink a lot of beer while I don't.
mrandish 12 hours ago [-]
The most surprising thing about early and mid-80s hobbyist computer culture (BBSes, users groups, etc) is despite being so open, egalitarian and easy to join, more than half of everyone you'd meet would be someone cool, interesting and worth knowing. I still have several close friends who I met in those days through random computer clubs. All of my little group of friends went on to have fairly notable careers involved in cool computer products, projects or companies you've probably heard of. And over the decades, many others that I'd hung out with at early user's groups and local computer shows became notable enough to follow their adventures in industry magazines.
I don't think that was just a fluke of random luck. I suspect early 8-bit hobby computing (especially outside universities) was an almost perfect gating filter. Nothing was very easy, little was well documented and frankly, it wasn't yet all that much fun. While there was some fun to be had, there were always bits of barbed wire and broken glass to crawl over first, whether typing in BASIC listings from a poorly printed 'zine (inevitably with a few misprints to debug), or figuring out at which volume level software might load from finicky cassette tapes. And even when you got something to finally work, the fun came in short bursts before the next cryptic barrier would arise.
The experience never quite lived up to what we'd imagined owning a hobby computer would be like while we were saving up our pennies to buy our own. But we persevered, driven forward by the sunk cost, brief interludes of fun and faith that tons of 'awesome' lay just ahead. The lack of relevant information beyond a few monthly magazines forced early hobbyists to find each other in ad hoc user's groups and then via BBSes. When I got my 4K, 800 Khz, 8-bit personal computer in 1981, no other person in my entire extended family's social circles knew anyone else who owned a computer at home. Even the concept sounded as strange as owning a "personal cement truck". The first question was always, "A what...?" followed by "Why?" So, despite being just a teenager, my desperation for information forced me to start a user's group simply for lack of there being any in my area. And it quickly grew to several hundred members despite my ineptitude and lack of experience at... well, anything. It turns out, the hearty souls both enthusiastic and naive enough to buy a computer for a hobby in those days, then persevere through failure and continue to connect with other lost users - ended up filtering for some unique qualities.
While the instant global connection (and gratification) of the web is amazing and immensely powerful, one thing we've perhaps lost along the way is that kind natural filter.
Karrot_Kream 10 hours ago [-]
There was a minimum level of stability you needed in your life at that time to be able to own a computer and pay the phone bills needed back then (I came later in the mid 90s-00s but it wasn't too much different by then.) Kids needed parents who had that stability, and most of those parents probably kept a decent eye on their kids. Even then, I remember some real characters in the computing scene from when I was a kid.
Now you can have crippling health issues and still post on the internet. In fact, you're probably more inclined to spend time online if interacting with the offline world is so tough. This was much harder from '85-05.
mrandish 9 hours ago [-]
> There was a minimum level of stability you needed in your life at that time to be able to own a computer...
True. I was fortunate to grow up middle-class in suburban California with a college grad dad and stay-at-home mom. Still, I had to mail-order my 4K computer to get it for $400 instead of the $500 MSRP, and even that was a BIG ask. By far the most expensive single thing my parents had ever bought for me. I had to settle for a Radio Shack Color Computer, even though I desperately wanted a Commodore 64. The C64's $600 MSRP was just too much to even consider suggesting and I didn't even dream of an $800 Atari 800 (but I do now own every 1980s Atari, Apple, Commodore and Sinclair computer). :-)
Turns out, that Coco was accidentally perfect for me because the CPU wasn't the usual 6502 or Z80 but the unique Motorola 6809, a true 8/16 hybrid (the same way the later, very similar, 68000 was a 16/32 bit hybrid). The 6809 was far more powerful per clock than the 6502 or Z80 and had a huge, orthogonal "PDP-ish" ISA with dual stacks, multiple 16-bit index registers and maskable interrupts enabling advanced code that was position-independent, re-entrant and multi-tasking. But the trade off was the Coco was all CPU and no dedicated graphics or sound chips, so the screen was memory mapped and we had to move each pixel on every frame with only the CPU.
So, never having touched a computer before and starting from zero with no help, I had to first teach myself BASIC from the Radio Shack's manual and then how to push the hell out of that sweet 16-bit CPU with highly-optimized, hand-coded assembler. It took years and was painfully slow and difficult. But it turns out the brutal discipline of cycle-counting down to the metal while racing the CRT beam every 63.5 microseconds was the best foundation imaginable for my future. A future I had no way of knowing would include the Amiga 1000 in 1985, on to 2D graphics, real-time broadcast video, 3D rendering (including working on new movies and shows in the science fiction franchises that shaped my childhood) and being there for the birth of the first GPUs. Not being able to afford the computer I wanted and having to teach myself computing due to flunking out of college, led directly to a multi-decade career as a serial tech entrepreneur. So, bad grades, early failure and stumbling along with no coherent plan can occasionally work out surprisingly well.
> some real characters in the computing scene
Oh, yes indeed. I had to sneak into my first couple Comdex, CES and NCC trade shows due to being too young, not 'in the trade' AND being broke. But I met (and partied with) OG legends like John Draper (Cap'n Crunch), young Bill Gates, even younger Steve Jobs, and a whole zoo of eccentric characters including a guy who legally changed his name to R2D3, and a guy who dressed like Gandalf every day. Of course, these days there's a clerk at the local UPS store who wears a Gryffindor cape daily but in the mid-80s that stuff was wild for a suburban kid. But as I said in my first post, nearly everyone I met in 80s computing was interesting, worth knowing, and usually happy to help a random kid who wasn't interesting OR worth knowing.
washadjeffmad 17 hours ago [-]
Can't hear Fidonet without recommending BBS: The Documentary (2005)
This is how I grew up. Using fidonet via my local RPGA group.
jlundberg 4 hours ago [-]
It is hard today to grasp what Fidonet really was. But for me and many others it was such a life changing thing.
Do you know of any good articles, books or blog post written for outsiders to read?
kylemaxwell 17 hours ago [-]
This was my first exposure to an internet (as opposed to the Internet), via BBSs, when I was a teenager. I keep thinking we should bring the term "sysop" back, in fact.
Nostalgia may be a form of depression, I've been told, but a little touch of it once in a while is good for the soul.
biodiesel 16 hours ago [-]
:inbound host WAN
f6.n105.z1.fidonet.org
specialist 20 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 19 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 20 hours ago [-]
Aye, they were. I also liked listening to this [1] (Jason Scott's) interview with Mark Herring.
Amiga 500 + Fidonet brings back such fond memories.
tobi_bsf 18 hours ago [-]
Was a great time, completely free of spam, ai slop and mostly even political stuff. the world is really developing backwards.
drob518 18 hours ago [-]
Blast from the past.
ck2 18 hours 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 17 hours 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 18 hours 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)
iberator 11 hours ago [-]
zmodem/xmodem can still be used over ssh :) kermit is actually still in development.
I used it in like 2021 to transfer some data over serial from some really old laptop (386sx). Was faster than txp/ip over plip/slip
mcc1ane 20 hours ago [-]
(1993)
nickdothutton 18 hours ago [-]
I too remember.
Where is the "FidoNet" of today?
lukifer 11 hours ago [-]
NOSTR [0] is a store and forward relay service, ostensibly a distributed Twitter clone, but also highly extensible [1] to support other functionality.
(This is being taken as snark, and fair enough, it's not a high-effort comment, but I'm being sincere. I operated a relatively popular FidoNet-adjacent (same protocol different network) system in the mid-1990s. Reddit is the closest thing we have to the user experience (Reddit is substantially better).
icedchai 11 hours ago [-]
Yes, I was around the same time and had a moderately popular local BBS. Reddit (and arguably HN) do feel like the closest thing we have to BBSes today.
hollerith 10 hours ago [-]
This is very helpful to those of us who never experienced BBSes.
I sometimes think there will be a renaissance for Fidonet-like networks, when our politicians have banned encryption, implemented complete surveillance and generally destroyed the internet.
It would be a great irony, if we then went back to the networks of our childhood in order to be free.
I guess the other option might be i2p or something similar, but that is probably too easily accessible to remain free when the authoritarians in power lock down the internet.
İ developed a Netmail server for Hitnet called HitBase in 1995 or so. It allowed people to discover others around their city to meet. Possibly the earliest thing that resembles Facebook. Similarly, it was a privacy nightmare too, luckily short-lived.
HitNet introduced me to great people some of whom I still see today. It was such a tight-knit friendly community.
The advent of Internet killed it but some communities are still active on other platforms.
It was quite popular in Turkey in the 90's.
You can try it out in DOSBox here with some random HitNet packages: https://github.com/ssg/wolverine/releases/tag/2.32
Respect for the file_id.diz (2)! I thought mine was the last one on GitHub.
1. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision
2. https://github.com/ssg/fatalvision/blob/master/file_id.diz
https://github.com/tirrenotechnologies/tirreno/blob/master/F...
I lived near Los Angeles at the time and still remember meeting some guys in New York City entirely via free FidoNet messages. A few months later, for other reasons, I happened to make my first ever trip to New York and actually met up with those Fidonet friends and hung out with them. Good times.
A lot of stuff I would typically associate with the internet like pirating, forums, mail, large scale multiplayer games actually predates it
But yes, people did all of that many years before it was done on the World Wide Web.
(There's some complexity as to whether Usenet was an Internet thing early on, as it did the whole dial-up-over-PSTN thing, that Fidonet did, quite a lot before settling on mainly NNTP.)
More so that you think. Piracy was not actually most of it. There was a whole thriving shareware system, which in Fidonet was done via FREQs. Tens of thousands of nodes pushing archived shareware softwares, many long since forgotten, around the globe.
We got fidonet in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. It was utterly revolutionary for us - more than the internet that came later really. For the first time we could communicate with my two brothers overseas without paying for extremely exorbitant international telephone calls that lasted a couple of minutes at best.
Our modem was 2400bps (8-N-1 IIRC). We used the zmodem protocol. It was after I learned about computers but I learned a HUGE amount from this about protocols etc. Our phone system was terrible so error correction etc were of great importance. Working out how to dial slowly was also important for our terrible phone exchanges.
It let me keep in touch with my pal, K, who emigrated to South Africa and as a result he ended up sending me 21 1.2MB floppy disks with SLS Linux on them and kernel 0.99 (I think). The journey began! :-)
Were you all node sysops, or did your region just not have that last part — the point?
Zone:Net/Node.Point
But then later I became a Boss and got my own Node address 2:463/1161
Later on of course some nodes started distributing over the Internet so setting up a node became much easier (and I think there was a way for the node to allow multiple users read/write without even setting up a node/point at all).
An interesting aspect is that it was impossible to obtain an address without providing some service or newsletter on a specific subject to the sysop in return, so it was a privilege to have your own FidoNet address.
Huh? Not when I joined in my region. I didn't have to provide anything.
I was 14, but the BBS owner and mostly old guy heavy metal user base only found out when I later showed up at their annual user group meeting - and we had lots of fun (and drinks) together! They even took me clubbing later with a fake ID, and I woke up heavily wasted in the BBS owner's student apartment and we had microwaved frozen pizza together. Fun times.
I don't think that was just a fluke of random luck. I suspect early 8-bit hobby computing (especially outside universities) was an almost perfect gating filter. Nothing was very easy, little was well documented and frankly, it wasn't yet all that much fun. While there was some fun to be had, there were always bits of barbed wire and broken glass to crawl over first, whether typing in BASIC listings from a poorly printed 'zine (inevitably with a few misprints to debug), or figuring out at which volume level software might load from finicky cassette tapes. And even when you got something to finally work, the fun came in short bursts before the next cryptic barrier would arise.
The experience never quite lived up to what we'd imagined owning a hobby computer would be like while we were saving up our pennies to buy our own. But we persevered, driven forward by the sunk cost, brief interludes of fun and faith that tons of 'awesome' lay just ahead. The lack of relevant information beyond a few monthly magazines forced early hobbyists to find each other in ad hoc user's groups and then via BBSes. When I got my 4K, 800 Khz, 8-bit personal computer in 1981, no other person in my entire extended family's social circles knew anyone else who owned a computer at home. Even the concept sounded as strange as owning a "personal cement truck". The first question was always, "A what...?" followed by "Why?" So, despite being just a teenager, my desperation for information forced me to start a user's group simply for lack of there being any in my area. And it quickly grew to several hundred members despite my ineptitude and lack of experience at... well, anything. It turns out, the hearty souls both enthusiastic and naive enough to buy a computer for a hobby in those days, then persevere through failure and continue to connect with other lost users - ended up filtering for some unique qualities.
While the instant global connection (and gratification) of the web is amazing and immensely powerful, one thing we've perhaps lost along the way is that kind natural filter.
Now you can have crippling health issues and still post on the internet. In fact, you're probably more inclined to spend time online if interacting with the offline world is so tough. This was much harder from '85-05.
True. I was fortunate to grow up middle-class in suburban California with a college grad dad and stay-at-home mom. Still, I had to mail-order my 4K computer to get it for $400 instead of the $500 MSRP, and even that was a BIG ask. By far the most expensive single thing my parents had ever bought for me. I had to settle for a Radio Shack Color Computer, even though I desperately wanted a Commodore 64. The C64's $600 MSRP was just too much to even consider suggesting and I didn't even dream of an $800 Atari 800 (but I do now own every 1980s Atari, Apple, Commodore and Sinclair computer). :-)
Turns out, that Coco was accidentally perfect for me because the CPU wasn't the usual 6502 or Z80 but the unique Motorola 6809, a true 8/16 hybrid (the same way the later, very similar, 68000 was a 16/32 bit hybrid). The 6809 was far more powerful per clock than the 6502 or Z80 and had a huge, orthogonal "PDP-ish" ISA with dual stacks, multiple 16-bit index registers and maskable interrupts enabling advanced code that was position-independent, re-entrant and multi-tasking. But the trade off was the Coco was all CPU and no dedicated graphics or sound chips, so the screen was memory mapped and we had to move each pixel on every frame with only the CPU.
So, never having touched a computer before and starting from zero with no help, I had to first teach myself BASIC from the Radio Shack's manual and then how to push the hell out of that sweet 16-bit CPU with highly-optimized, hand-coded assembler. It took years and was painfully slow and difficult. But it turns out the brutal discipline of cycle-counting down to the metal while racing the CRT beam every 63.5 microseconds was the best foundation imaginable for my future. A future I had no way of knowing would include the Amiga 1000 in 1985, on to 2D graphics, real-time broadcast video, 3D rendering (including working on new movies and shows in the science fiction franchises that shaped my childhood) and being there for the birth of the first GPUs. Not being able to afford the computer I wanted and having to teach myself computing due to flunking out of college, led directly to a multi-decade career as a serial tech entrepreneur. So, bad grades, early failure and stumbling along with no coherent plan can occasionally work out surprisingly well.
> some real characters in the computing scene
Oh, yes indeed. I had to sneak into my first couple Comdex, CES and NCC trade shows due to being too young, not 'in the trade' AND being broke. But I met (and partied with) OG legends like John Draper (Cap'n Crunch), young Bill Gates, even younger Steve Jobs, and a whole zoo of eccentric characters including a guy who legally changed his name to R2D3, and a guy who dressed like Gandalf every day. Of course, these days there's a clerk at the local UPS store who wears a Gryffindor cape daily but in the mid-80s that stuff was wild for a suburban kid. But as I said in my first post, nearly everyone I met in 80s computing was interesting, worth knowing, and usually happy to help a random kid who wasn't interesting OR worth knowing.
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE
Do you know of any good articles, books or blog post written for outsiders to read?
Nostalgia may be a form of depression, I've been told, but a little touch of it once in a while is good for the soul.
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.
What I miss most is the local community aspect. In my teens and early 20's I met several friends through BBSes.
[1] https://archive.org/details/20021102-bbs-herring/Mark+Herrin...
(previously all transfers, Xmodem/Ymodem, were one-way with CRC checks on each block slowing things down)
And yeah, Zmodem was mind-blowing for us.
I used it in like 2021 to transfer some data over serial from some really old laptop (386sx). Was faster than txp/ip over plip/slip
[0] Notes & Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays: https://nostr.com/
[1] https://nips.nostr.com/