4 ms·
Ask HN: Remember Fidonet?
Is it still somehow alive today? Is it archived anywhere?
- orf 7mo agohttps://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+alive+today https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+alive+today https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+archived+anywhere https://www.google.com/search?q=is+fidonet+archived+anywhere
- zapp42 7mo agohttps://www.fidonet.org/ https://www.fidonet.org/
- jlarcombe 7mo agoFidoNet 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...
- invaliduser 7mo ago2:320/104 represent!
- Joe_Cool 7mo agoYes, but only what was mirrored to usenet: https://usenetarchives.com/groups.php?c=fido 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/ http://textfiles.com/bbs/FIDONET/ There is also a Giganews dump on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/giganews https://archive.org/details/giganews And this one: https://archive.org/details/usenet-fido https://archive.org/details/usenet-fido Google stopped being useful for usenet a while ago but still has some if you can find it.
- grumpysysop 7mo agoGet off my lawn!
- kjs3 7mo agoNick checks out.
- fidotron 7mo agoOf 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.
- wartywhoa23 7mo agoGreetings 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...
- man8alexd 7mo agoThe ex-USSR segment of FIDONET became the largest in the world around 1995-1996. Internet access was rare and very expensive until around 2000.
- tclancy 7mo agoIs your username an homage or your actual handle on fidonet?
- bjourne 7mo agoI do remember. :) Posted the same question ten years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932 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.
- ghaff 7mo agoWell, 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.
- DaiTengu 7mo agoThere 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.html 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 https://warensemble.com
- brk 7mo agoI 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.
- graycrow 7mo agoIt was really popular in Ukraine in the late '90s, before Internet became widely available. [Former point of 2:4614/1]
- throwaway_20357 7mo agoThere surely must be some BBS backup tapes somewhere that at least contain some of the boards?
- steve1977 7mo agoI 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).
- jeffreygoesto 7mo agoGreetings 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 https://www.mausnet.de
- qsort 7mo agoIt 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/ https://www.wired.com/1994/08/hacker-crackdown-italian-style...
- 3form 7mo ago>in 1494 Boy, I suspected it might have been before my time, but not that much!
- qsort 7mo agoit'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.
- UomoNeroNero 7mo agoMi hai fatto sentire molto vecchio. Grazie :-D
- harrigan 7mo agoEpisode 4 of the BBS documentary covers Fidonet and is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng0NE4lDP2U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng0NE4lDP2U
- david_iqlabs 7mo ago[flagged]
- bluGill 7mo agoOne 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.
- roryirvine 7mo agolwn.net does that well, highlighting unread comments as a perk for higher-tier subscribers. I wish it was a more-widespread practice.
- vova_hn2 7mo agoIt 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.
- ghaff 7mo agoThere 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.
- anovikov 7mo ago2:5019/19
- lexszero_ 7mo agoFormer 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 https://kuehlbox.wtf/projects,fidian - no affiliation.
- grishka 7mo agoI'm too young to have used it myself but from what I know it was huge in Russia in the 90s.
- cykros 7mo agoLast 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 https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:fidonet The homepage for FIDONet itself is here: https://www.fidonet.org/ https://www.fidonet.org/ And the Zone 1 Hub, Dark Realms (a Renegade BBS since 1994) is here: https://www.darkrealms.ca/ https://www.darkrealms.ca/ It has node lists available if you're looking for systems to connect from.
- ferd 7mo agoyes! 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 :-)
- b112 7mo agoPunterNet, 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 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.
- throw0101d 7mo agoI also remember using the BlueWave offline mail reader: * https://en.everybodywiki.com/Blue_Wave_(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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_(file_format) * https://web.archive.org/web/20080509070947/http://combee.techwood.org/old/soup12.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080509070947/http://combee.tec... And Tradewars 2002 'door game': * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Wars * https://breakintochat.com/wiki/TradeWars_2002 https://breakintochat.com/wiki/TradeWars_2002 * https://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game https://breakintochat.com/wiki/BBS_door_game * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door_(bulletin_board_system)
- flyinghamster 7mo agoI was a big fan of msged on my Net 115 point. https://github.com/jrnutt/msged 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/ https://sourceforge.net/p/btxe/code/
- BeetleB 7mo agoI 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.
- Jemaclus 7mo agoLegend 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-Design.html 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!
- rozzie 7mo agoFidoNet 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 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21670035 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hackers_Conference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute... https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto https://www.stevenlevy.com/crypto
- andsoitis 7mo ago> Tom Jennings - and his views of community and identity. https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings https://grokipedia.com/page/tom_jennings Human version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Jennings
- thatxliner 7mo ago[flagged]
- andsoitis 7mo agoPossible. Their HN profile claims they’re Ray Ozzie, which I find hard to believe. https://keybase.io/rozzie https://keybase.io/rozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie
- QuantumAtom 7mo agoFor those who want to learn more, there is a BBS documentary: https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary https://archive.org/details/bbs_documentary
- rsync 7mo ago… and the fidonet chapter of that documentary is the best one. Highly recommended.
- flyinghamster 7mo agoAs 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.
- robertcope 7mo agoI was more active on WWIVnet, but I definitely remember Fidonet! Good times.
- agentultra 7mo agoI 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.
- ivan_gammel 7mo agoYes, remember. 2:5010/7 went live with the wind of change. Went dark when the winds changed.
- loloquwowndueo 7mo agothe 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.
- rswail 7mo agoI 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
- man8alexd 7mo agoJust discovered that Debian still has ifmail and binkd packages.
- nickdothutton 7mo agoGiven 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.
- DaiTengu 7mo agoIt'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 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.
- zenethian 7mo agoI 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.
- emmelaich 7mo agoHuh, 10 years ago: "Ask HN: Remember FidoNet?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12216932 Has fewer replies than this!
- shaunpud 7mo agoI remember sending my first ever email using my local dial-up BBS. first.last@f6x0.n6x0.fidonet.org or something like that. Those were the days!
- sershe 7mo agoFidonet 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.