For people wondering what we're talking about, FidoNet was organized into continents (Zones) and then into cities or small regions (Nets). Zone 1 was North Ame

For people wondering what we're talking about, FidoNet was organized into continents (Zones) and then into cities or small regions (Nets). Zone 1 was North America. A city like San Antonio typically existed as a Net. In San Antonio's case, it was 387, so all San Antonio Fido BBSes had an address like 1:387/somenumber. Fido's hub-and-star system existed to more efficiently move mail. Many of the Net- and Zone-level coordinators didn't run huge BBSes with lots of phone lines that could move the large (for this era of slow modems) amount of mail that could be generated. Volunteers with more money and expertise formed a mail routing system outside of the Fido leadership hierarchy to get the job done. Some better-funded local person in your Net would step up and become a "hub". All of the local BBSes would send their mail to the hub, which would make a long-distance call a few times a day to send mail upstream to a "star", which was basically the same thing, just moving much more mail at a higher level in the hierarchy. Stars would call other stars and move the mail over long distances, including across continents. The stars were the real power-holders in Fido.