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Comment by MichaelRenor | Hacker News Reader

>This was usually run by someone with money because their modems were making long-distance calls (including overseas) on a regular basis.

It's amazing to me is how many people volunteered their time, hardware, and money to keep these systems running for free.

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It is, but there was also a certain amount of vanity to it. If you had the cash, you were the dude. You could watch as an entire region's (or even entire countries') mail flowed through your system. You probably walked down into your office and watched your busy Fido server (or servers) and a sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear) and when you participated in group mailing lists, you probably signed your e-mails with a sig that said something like "Bob Smith, Southern Star, 1:10/2", your address being a coveted and sweet, low-digit number. You were respected for your technical mastery of the system and in the very political world of Fido, few would challenge you.

I dreamed of running a big Fido hub. Sadly, Fido vanished before I reached the income level where I could have a bank of phone lines making long-distance calls all day and not worry about it. Just running a single phone line was an expensive challenge for me as a young kid. It took a lot of bussing tables at a hamburger joint.

Even the talk of "long distance phone calls" makes me nostalgic.

I remember when, as a kid, if you answered the phone and it was a long distance call for mom or dad, we would run to get them yelling "Long distance! Long distance!"

Every second was precious.

This is why we need to colonize space. Bring back those low-bandwidth long distance communications.

Ham radio. 300 baud packet over HF (thousands of miles) is still a thing, as are newer data modes such as PSK31 and the JT family. I'm actively working on 1200 baud projects over VHF FM now. Back in the day BBS was very much in. These days the same tech is more often used for telemetry, tracking etc (APRS). Now you can do it all in software, ref https://github.com/wb2osz/direwolf and friends.

Ham radio doesn't allow for encrypted connections AFAIK, which makes it a lot less interesting to me.

Why wouldn't it allow encryption? Can't anything that sends and receives packets be able to be encrypted?

Not if the law forbids encrypted connections over Ham frequencies :)

Oh I see. A policy restriction and not technical.

The restriction is because commercial activities are prohibited over amateur radio, and encrypted traffic would prevent that rule from being enforced.

I believe there's an exception for controlling remote devices when you need to make sure some rando doesn't brick your pricy gear.

Is that a privacy issue or some other factor?

Yes, and seeing LD boards outside of the usual ones in your local calling area was an exotic treat. Every second was precious. :)

Oh my, do I ever remember that. I'm sure you remember the days before digital long distance, when you would make a call from, say, San Antonio to L.A. and the line would be crackly and staticky. When I would call my grandma in Hawaii, you would talk and she would hear it about a second later. Made conversations tough and expensive!

You could also use Frontdoor and the like to run non-Fidonet message nets, I don't remember the terminology but my BBS was part of one.

I made friends with a fellow in Texas that claimed he had won a counter suit against AT&T for false phreaking charges and settled out of court for some number of years of free long distance. Because of this he would call my board and push me the mail from our other nodes every day and save me the money.

Now that I'm older the story sounds implausible and I think the dude might have just been lonely.

It was a lot of fun getting messages from boards in South Africa and other places every day. A very prominent HNer ran a BBS that was also a member of the network though I'm sure they wouldn't appreciate being outed! Such fun times.

I used a mailer front end called Intermail, and I remember at age 15 it was unimaginably complicated to set up.

> sweet stack of USR Courier external modems blinking away (you never wasted time on cheap gear)

USR offered substantial discounts to BBS operators to keep us from buying cheap gear. I pre-ordered some pre-v.34 (upgradeable) Courier V.Everything for my board at BBSCon for $249/ea. I think that's about what a Sportster 14.4K was selling for at the time.

25-years-ago me is very angry that he never knew about these discounts!!

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