Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?

Posted by ukkare 14 hours ago

Counter112Comment67OpenOriginal

Is it still somehow alive today? Is it archived anywhere?

Comments

Comment by rozzie 12 hours ago

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

Comment by andsoitis 12 hours ago

> Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings

Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings

Comment by thatxliner 12 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by andsoitis 11 hours ago

Possible.

Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe.

https://keybase.io/rozzie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie

Comment by tclancy 11 hours ago

Their account that has been posting for over 15 years and has made numerous comments with real insight into the times under discussion? I know it's necessary to have a healthy bit of skepticism when being on the Internet but I think we could agree this is one of the weirdest, longest, dumbest cons in the history of confidence games if this is not Ray Ozzie.

HN has a fairly wide group of "famous" contributors like Woz, etc.

Comment by andsoitis 11 hours ago

Right, which is why my first instinct was to write “possible”.

If it is you, Ray: I thought your creations Lotus Notes and Groove were phenomenal!!

Comment by blast 9 hours ago

When did Woz post here? I'd love to see that.

Comment by tclancy 41 minutes ago

I might be thinking of Metafilter, where he commented for a while. Could have sworn he commented on something here.

Comment by Cyphase 11 hours ago

Sure looks legit based on the linked Keybase, Twitter, and GitHub.

Comment by whalesalad 8 hours ago

A bot can't have a keybase, twitter, and github account?

Comment by Cyphase 7 hours ago

I didn't say because those accounts exist, I said based on them.

Comment by cykros 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by jlarcombe 13 hours ago

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...

Comment by QuantumAtom 12 hours ago

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

Comment by rsync 4 hours ago

… and the fidonet chapter of that documentary is the best one.

Highly recommended.

Comment by david_iqlabs 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by bluGill 12 hours ago

One thing I miss about HN type forums is the "here is what you haven't read yet". When an article has 100 comments and I've already read 75 it is rarely worth my time wading through to see the new ones. Even though I know from experience that writing a good insightful comment takes a lot of time. Most of what I'm missing will not be very insightful, but I'm sure I'm missing some of the most insightful comments. It also discourages me (and I assume others) from writing a long insightful response at times because I most of the people who would be interested will see it.

Comment by vova_hn2 2 hours ago

It should be trivial to write an reader program for hn that does that.

These days you might even vibecode it in one prompt, although coding it manually is not super hard either.

Comment by roryirvine 10 hours ago

lwn.net does that well, highlighting unread comments as a perk for higher-tier subscribers. I wish it was a more-widespread practice.

Comment by ghaff 11 hours ago

There was also a locality to BBSs (less so the distributed relay systems like Fidonet) because of the cost of non-local telephone calls. I was a subscriber to a BBS is a relatively nearby city (though telephone costs were still high--used offline readers). A number of us would get together in-real-life semi-regularly.

Comment by qsort 12 hours ago

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...

Comment by 3form 12 hours ago

>in 1494

Boy, I suspected it might have been before my time, but not that much!

Comment by qsort 10 hours ago

it's a typo, but you've gotta admit Lorenzo il Magnifico on a 90s BBS dealing with political scandal in a steampunk Florence is a sick premise for a novel.

Comment by throw0101d 12 hours ago

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)

Comment by Jemaclus 10 hours ago

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!

Comment by liveoneggs 10 hours ago

I loved BRE and LoRD so much. I would dial into like five BBS to play my turns every day.

My first close friend group from high school were actually from BBS Meetups more than school buds. When we found a crossover it was really weird!

Comment by Jemaclus 9 hours ago

Same!

Comment by BeetleB 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by roryirvine 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by throw0101d 9 hours ago

I was a point in Net250 for a while. I was a private node on another network (whose name currently escapes me).

Comment by flyinghamster 11 hours ago

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/

Comment by fidotron 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by wartywhoa23 12 hours ago

Greetings from a Russian, still friendly despite all the political shitshow :)

We spent so many nights with my friend (15 yo in 1996, the peak FidoNet) connecting to BBSes over phone modem, soaking up all the Fido lore, humour and lingo, dreaming of obtaining us a .point for ourselves somehow. To that end, we visited a number of local "sysopkas" and "pointovkas" (sysop/point parties), making friends with actual point owners who gathered in a local park to booze some and have fun.

What a blessed time it was! The future seemed spotless and bright...

Comment by man8alexd 11 hours ago

The ex-USSR segment of FIDONET became the largest in the world around 1995-1996. Internet access was rare and very expensive until around 2000.

Comment by tclancy 11 hours ago

Is your username an homage or your actual handle on fidonet?

Comment by fidotron 11 hours ago

Homage. I really like the ideals of fidonet.

Edit to add, and as our friendly Russian here reminded us, it was a much more optimistic time.

Comment by maratc 11 hours ago

actual fidonet addresses are numbers, not letters.

Comment by emmelaich 2 hours ago

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

Has fewer replies than this!

Comment by flyinghamster 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by DaiTengu 6 hours ago

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.

Comment by zapp42 13 hours ago

https://www.fidonet.org/

Comment by harrigan 12 hours ago

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

Comment by agentultra 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by zenethian 5 hours ago

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.

Comment by loloquwowndueo 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by steve1977 12 hours ago

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).

Comment by jeffreygoesto 12 hours ago

Greetings from the past! Was on KA2 back then, Minnie was such a nice user experience. Will always remember the groups Pascal, Oberlehrer and Allohol =;-D

[0] https://www.mausnet.de

Comment by b112 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by ferd 12 hours ago

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 :-)

Comment by nickdothutton 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by rswail 11 hours ago

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

Comment by graycrow 12 hours ago

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

Comment by grishka 12 hours ago

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

Comment by robertcope 11 hours ago

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

Comment by brk 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by invaliduser 13 hours ago

2:320/104 represent!

Comment by Joe_Cool 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by ivan_gammel 11 hours ago

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

Comment by throwaway_20357 12 hours ago

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

Comment by man8alexd 11 hours ago

Just discovered that Debian still has ifmail and binkd packages.

Comment by grumpysysop 13 hours ago

Get off my lawn!

Comment by kjs3 9 hours ago

Nick checks out.

Comment by anovikov 12 hours ago

2:5019/19

Comment by lexszero_ 11 hours ago

Former 2:5034/16 here.

I was born too late and missed most of the fun, but still managed to catch the trailing end of fidonet in the late 2000s. Pretty much everything was over IP already, there wasn't a single proper dial-up node in my local network (which was pretty small already, around 20 nodes in its heyday), but for me this IP connection happened to be a pay-by-the-minute dialup ISP, so the offline nature of fidonet helped me stay glued to the computer and actively participate in dozens of communities with just a few expensive online minutes per day. Later in highschool (I even managed to find a teenage crush my age from another city in some echo! we exchanged pics with uuencode in netmail =D) I ran my own dialup node just for fun on an old PII with NT4 in a cardboard box under my bed. It survived multiple hardware and geographical moves and was running over IP up to about 2012-ish, and was finally nuked from the nodelist in 2018. I still have all the configs in the backups somewhere and the active NCs contact, so technically could get it back up if really wanted to. Too bad there's nobody there to speak to.

Addition: turned out, nowadays you can just run the "normal" FTN stack (binkd, husky, golded) in a docker container and access it with a browser. "It's not dead, it's just smells like it". https://kuehlbox.wtf/projects,fidian - no affiliation.

Comment by bjourne 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by DaiTengu 6 hours ago

There are two archives available. What ExecPC had before it was frozen in time, covering 1993-1997 or so, and an archive from "Starfleet HQ BBS" https://breakintochat.com/collections/messages/fidonet/index...

A lot of current BBSes may have archives from the last 10 years or so. I know mine does: https://warensemble.com

Comment by ghaff 11 hours ago

Well, and hard drives fail and there weren't really great economical backup options at the time. In spite of being active on one BBS in particular, I basically have nothing digital saved from that time.

Comment by orf 13 hours ago

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

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