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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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! :-)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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
WOW! Your FatalVision (1) is absolutely shiny! Wish I'd had it in the 90s.
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
Thanks! I loved working on it!
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.
For those interested, FidoNet and "Alt nets" such as fsxNet are still going and active!
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
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.
2:463/1161 here. Nostalgia is strong with this one.
привет от 2:464 :)
4:920/35 here :)
2:5058/35 :)
2:463/80
Ого! Обнял-поднял!:)
formerly 1:153/7015 here
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
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
I started as a point but after couple of years I become a node with a few points (mainly friends and family).
Sysop?
Yell for sysop!
I have very fond memories of fidonet: discussions, friends made, parties held. I wish i was back there :)
So go back. It's still there, just waiting for you!
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.
> 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.
Similar situation, except they know from the beginning that I'm 14, and they drink a lot of beer while I don't.
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.
You didn’t need to be a node to be on Fidonet.
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).
You didn’t even need to need a point to be on Fidonet.
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.
Can't hear Fidonet without recommending BBS: The Documentary (2005)
youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7nj3G6Jpv2G6Gp6NvN1kUtQuW8QshBWE
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! :-)
This is how I grew up. Using fidonet via my local RPGA group.
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.
:inbound host WAN f6.n105.z1.fidonet.org
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.
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.
Aye, they were. I also liked listening to this [1] (Jason Scott's) interview with Mark Herring.
[1] https://archive.org/details/20021102-bbs-herring/Mark+Herrin...
Amiga 500 + Fidonet brings back such fond memories.
Was a great time, completely free of spam, ai slop and mostly even political stuff. the world is really developing backwards.
Blast from the past.
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)
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.
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)
I too remember. Where is the "FidoNet" of today?
https://www.fidonet.org/
It's called Reddit.
(1993)
Best social network in history!