I remember dialing up to a local BBS that was a FidoNet node. The discussion forums/mailing lists had the same sense of urgency and intensity as today's Twitter hashtags or subreddits.
The amount of misinformation was about equal, too. I learned a lot of outright bullshit stated as fact reading those as a 12-year old. The difference is there's now zero limit to that nonsense being spread...
TheOtherHobbes 1367 days ago [-]
This was when a 14.4k modem was the last word in speed, and you were literally paying your phone company by the minute for a connection. Public access to Usenet required access through an ISP, who would also charge - separately - by the minute.
Modems were very optional, because not everyone had that kind of money.
At 14.4k it takes maybe 10 seconds to download a JPEG, and tens of minutes to hours to download a low-res video clip.
Neither Usenet nor Fidonet had anything like a browser. Files had to be converted to ASCII for upload, often in parts, and then glued back together and converted to the original format manually using various helper applications.
It was still exciting and fun though.
bluGill 1367 days ago [-]
2400 baud was the gold standard. 9600 and then 14.4k came latter. I stuck on 300 baud for a while and rejoyced when I got a 1200 baud modem for a birthday - then lightning took it out...
Usenet was reading was free via the local university unsecured dial-in (not ppp just a terminal that would telnet into any computer you knew of) , but without an email address you couldn't do much so I didn't spend much time there. Fido and the other local bbs systems provides free accounts that made the whole thing useful.
Then the web hit and you could find useful things on the internet. It was all downhill from there for Usenet.
ncrmro 1366 days ago [-]
I’m starting to work on microcontrollers and born in the 90s. Upload at like 115200 i believe and just like dang we’ve come a long way.
jasonjayr 1367 days ago [-]
Remember when yEnc showed up, and discovered that most NNTP servers could actually deal with mostly 8-bit bodies, and it made transferring files that much more efficient?
Good times, indeed!
u801e 1367 days ago [-]
It's still used in binary groups to this day. It's too bad that it never really was used in email and most email clients didn't support it.
IIRC, NNTP, SMTP, and I believe IMAP servers do not treat any character as significant from a protocol standpoint other than ascii NULL (0x00), CR (0x0D), LF (0x0A), and . (0X2E) (the last only when at the beginning of a line). Those are the only 4 characters that yEnc escapes for encoding purposes.
tyingq 1367 days ago [-]
There was also quite a lot of hijacking of military, corporate, and university bandwidth at the time for Usenet. Dump to floppies and take it home. Often faster than a modem from beginning to end.
bitwize 1367 days ago [-]
There was also quite a lot of hijacking of military, corporate, and university bandwidth for Doom. Doom had very chatty, unoptimized netcode (which Quake would later improve upon) and networked Doom was banned outright at many sites for starving legitimate users of bandwidth.
I think I was still using Fidonet and Usenet even when I had 33.6K in mid 90s and also 56K, although at 56K by the end of 90s I already switched to internet paid per hour, but Usenet groups were for me really internet thing already, good predecessor of Reddit and various PHP forums.
Fidonet was practical - possible to download all groups/messages at once for lot of offline reading and responding saving lot of money for lot of content.
anthk 1367 days ago [-]
Ditto with usenet, you can set up SLRN like that.
andrewshadura 1367 days ago [-]
The article completely fails to mention that in Eastern Europe FidoNet existed and was popular well until mid-00's, and that a rather small community in Russia still exists to this day.
anthk 1367 days ago [-]
Usenet too, at least for programmers and IF/Nethack players.
bbarnett 1367 days ago [-]
And yet none speak for punternet. Even wikipedia doesn't mention it here:
At the time, punternet offered everything fidonet did. But... time passes....
_sbrk 1367 days ago [-]
I miss BlueWave offline mail reader...
nn just didn't compare when I got to University. irc was and still is fantastic.
myth_drannon 1367 days ago [-]
Right? Such a fantastic way to read mail. Just keyboard and the text.
ruslan 1367 days ago [-]
Although exiting, IRC was/is a whole different world! :)
mrlonglong 1367 days ago [-]
Fossil driver, QWK reader and tosser and you're set :-)
ruslan 1367 days ago [-]
uucp, uucico, tin and you are set. ;)
ruslan 1367 days ago [-]
rz@skyrocket:~ % man uucico
No manual entry for uucico
rz@skyrocket:~ % uname -a
FreeBSD skyrocket 9.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE #1: Fri Nov 27 20:28:19 UTC 2015 root@skyrocket:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SKYROCKET amd64
Hopefully cu is till there.
yakk0 1367 days ago [-]
BlueWave was fantastic. I miss it too.
wenbin 1367 days ago [-]
Some Chinese tech entrepreneurs were FidoNet users in 1990s, e.g.,Ma Huateng (Tecnent Founder & CEO), Ding Lei (NetEase Founder & CEO), Lei Jun (Xiaomi Founder & CEO)...
ruslan 1367 days ago [-]
ex 2:5077/7 here.
Almost any tech guy in early 90s was a Fidonet or Usenet user. That was the only mean of communication and source of technical information available worldwide, an informational Klondike for programmers, electronics engineers, for all kind of hobbyists. Personally, I can say that Fidonet had a significant impact on my career and on whole my life. I was a node running multiline BBS somewhere in the middle of Siberia in 90th. It was a technical challenge, it tought me to deal with and solve many technical and organisational issues. I learnt and studied TCP/IP by reading Fidonet echos (aka Usenet groups) and tought myself to deploy IP networks (including DNS) not having IP access because there was not any in my place at that time. I learnt to use OS/2, then FreeBSD. And there was no Google to ask. Participating in echos gave me a good warm feeling of the big world at my fingertips.
simonblack 1367 days ago [-]
I remember using UUCP to link the half-dozen or so nodes of our little local net back 1991 (or thereabouts).
One of our members shared an excited piece of information: "Hey, wow! I just heard there's a whole million nodes on the Net."
The Net back then was Usenet, email, and (sometimes) ftp.
That new-fangled WWW thing was just a strange curiosity. It would never take off anyway, how would you know what websites were around? And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive.
tialaramex 1367 days ago [-]
> And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive.
I firmly believe Always On made more difference than the Broadband bandwidth most users got at the same time.
My first student household had 24/7 Internet access at modem speeds, 56kbps (at best) shared between half a dozen people. But even though that's scarcely any bandwidth (my last student house was 2Mbps DSL shared between two people for comparison) the fact it's always there changed how we used it compared to people with conventional dial-up.
simonblack 1366 days ago [-]
When I first got Always On, it still took me several weeks before I wasn't twitchy enough to actually leave it on. Those years of 30 hours of monthly connection quotas died hard.
It was a bit of a shock to the system again, when in 2011 I spent 8 months travelling in France with 2gig/month (60mb/day) quotas again.
anthk 1367 days ago [-]
There is a Gopher server with a Fidonet mirror, I can't find it.
EDIT: gopher://synchro.net
anticsapp 1367 days ago [-]
I hope this isn't off topic. I've been interested in perusing Usenet groups from the 80s like rec.music -- I swear ten years ago this was possible. I can't figure out how to do it now. Did the massive load of binaries kill off archival efforts? I can't find a search engine for Usenet anywhere. I'm just interested in plan text conversations.
I ran a FidoNet bbs on my 1200 baud on my parents phone line. Always pissed because they missed calls. I ended up upgrading to 2400 baud that could tell the difference between a modem and a voice call which made things easier. So many BBSes that were part time.
Rendered at 06:27:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The amount of misinformation was about equal, too. I learned a lot of outright bullshit stated as fact reading those as a 12-year old. The difference is there's now zero limit to that nonsense being spread...
Modems were very optional, because not everyone had that kind of money.
At 14.4k it takes maybe 10 seconds to download a JPEG, and tens of minutes to hours to download a low-res video clip.
Neither Usenet nor Fidonet had anything like a browser. Files had to be converted to ASCII for upload, often in parts, and then glued back together and converted to the original format manually using various helper applications.
It was still exciting and fun though.
Usenet was reading was free via the local university unsecured dial-in (not ppp just a terminal that would telnet into any computer you knew of) , but without an email address you couldn't do much so I didn't spend much time there. Fido and the other local bbs systems provides free accounts that made the whole thing useful.
Then the web hit and you could find useful things on the internet. It was all downhill from there for Usenet.
Good times, indeed!
IIRC, NNTP, SMTP, and I believe IMAP servers do not treat any character as significant from a protocol standpoint other than ascii NULL (0x00), CR (0x0D), LF (0x0A), and . (0X2E) (the last only when at the beginning of a line). Those are the only 4 characters that yEnc escapes for encoding purposes.
Fidonet was practical - possible to download all groups/messages at once for lot of offline reading and responding saving lot of money for lot of content.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Punter
Yet, in the 300 baud days, before PC clones became numerous, when the C64 was the most sold PC on the planet, PunterBBS, and PunterNET was worldwide.
I ran such a BBS, on a C64 with two of these:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1571
At the time, punternet offered everything fidonet did. But... time passes....
nn just didn't compare when I got to University. irc was and still is fantastic.
No manual entry for uucico
rz@skyrocket:~ % uname -a
FreeBSD skyrocket 9.3-RELEASE FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE #1: Fri Nov 27 20:28:19 UTC 2015 root@skyrocket:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/SKYROCKET amd64
Hopefully cu is till there.
Almost any tech guy in early 90s was a Fidonet or Usenet user. That was the only mean of communication and source of technical information available worldwide, an informational Klondike for programmers, electronics engineers, for all kind of hobbyists. Personally, I can say that Fidonet had a significant impact on my career and on whole my life. I was a node running multiline BBS somewhere in the middle of Siberia in 90th. It was a technical challenge, it tought me to deal with and solve many technical and organisational issues. I learnt and studied TCP/IP by reading Fidonet echos (aka Usenet groups) and tought myself to deploy IP networks (including DNS) not having IP access because there was not any in my place at that time. I learnt to use OS/2, then FreeBSD. And there was no Google to ask. Participating in echos gave me a good warm feeling of the big world at my fingertips.
One of our members shared an excited piece of information: "Hey, wow! I just heard there's a whole million nodes on the Net."
The Net back then was Usenet, email, and (sometimes) ftp.
That new-fangled WWW thing was just a strange curiosity. It would never take off anyway, how would you know what websites were around? And anyway, hour-long long-distance phone calls were prohibitively expensive.
I firmly believe Always On made more difference than the Broadband bandwidth most users got at the same time.
My first student household had 24/7 Internet access at modem speeds, 56kbps (at best) shared between half a dozen people. But even though that's scarcely any bandwidth (my last student house was 2Mbps DSL shared between two people for comparison) the fact it's always there changed how we used it compared to people with conventional dial-up.
It was a bit of a shock to the system again, when in 2011 I spent 8 months travelling in France with 2gig/month (60mb/day) quotas again.
EDIT: gopher://synchro.net
I believe it's based on the data they bought from Deja back in 2001 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups)
The archive seems to use mbox for everything, so you'll probably need an email client to read it, but that's it.
[0] https://archive.org/details/usenet
[1] https://archive.org/details/usenet-music
Run XTerm with the 10x20 fixed font, then:
Enjoy.