Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by henrikschroder | Hacker News Reader

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> Doing Fido over TCP/IP just doesn't feel the same. It's way too easy.

Do you remember ZMH? Zone Mail Hour? If you had a public BBS, you had to disallow logins during ZMH, so that your phone line was reserved for netmail and echomail delivery.

I was just a lowly point, so I didn't have to bother with that crap. 2:201/274.9 representin', yo.

The funniest part about the star-shaped network was that it was more of a feudal society than a democracy. And of course it devolved into political fights among the lowly nodes and points who thought the stupid RCs and NCs had way too much power over the network and wanted it to become more democratic, but since the coordinators (Did you call them stars in zone 1?) footed the bill for the long-distance message deliveries, it was usually their way or the highway.

Funnily enough, Sweden abolished the concept of long-distance calls sometime in the 90s, which drastically undercut the power of the controllers. :-)

Finishing my original thought in the comment, since I got sidetracked by the nostalgia:

The reason for ZMH was that a node making a connection to another node required the use of a physical phone line where one node would dial the other, which would stop anyone else from connecting to those two nodes. So if you had a lowly user logged on to your BBS, noone else could log on to it, and you couldn't send or receive Fidonet mail.

Contrast that with TCP/IP where it's possible to have millions of active connections to other nodes on a single node without breaking a sweat, and it's just a ridiculous comparison.

Another hilarious quirk of the times was that almost noone was running a multitasking OS (Amiga users: shut up!), which meant that once someone had called your Frontdoor system and delivered mail, it would exit, and start your mailer (Fmail!), which would uncompress the received file, put all the messages in your local message db (We're talking flatfiles of course, SQL was nowhere in sight), and prepare packages for all your downstream nodes, and after that it would start up Frontdoor again, at which point you could finally receive calls again.

So not only were the systems unable to handle more than one connection at a time, there was also no background processing, so while your computer was busy unpacking an enormous serveral-hundred-kilobytes zip file of mail, it couldn't accept any calls.

Oh, oh! And there was no Unicode, not UTF8, so there was a years-long technical debate/flamewar/ridiculous shoutfest about which character set to standardize on, where the main contenders were CP437 vs. ISO-8859-1.

Looking back, it's amazing it worked at all, but it did, and that was fucking magic.

Effin client, can't edit nor reply: s/qemu/desqview/

Pirated version of qemu was a thing for us non-amiga operators :)

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.

I ran 2:250/165 back in the day. RemoteAccess 2 and FrontDoor NC. And running Desqview so I could have the BBS running as well as mess with my pc ;)

What do these numbers mean ? My Google-Fu is failing

I was just a little bit too young to get access to BBS in my youth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet

I was 2:201/274.9. My upstream node that I connected to was 2:201/274. He connected to his upstream hub, 2:201/200, who in turn connected to his upstream net coordinator, 2:201/0, whose upstream was the regional coordinator, 2:20/0, and finally up to the zone coordinator, who I think was 2:0/0 or something.

A zone was a continent, 2 was Europe. Regions were countries in Europe, 20 was Sweden. Each region could have any number of networks, Sweden had like 5, and network 1 was the Stockholm area. Each network had hubs and nodes, and the guy who ran the node I talked to was simply the 74th node of the 2nd hub. Finally, since I didn't have a public BBS, I was a private point, the 9th on my node.

So putting it all together, a Fidonet address is zone:regionnetwork/hubnode.point.

Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)

> Why weren't there separator characters between the region and the networks, or the hub and the nodes? Who knows, it worked. :-)

Because the original scheme didn't account for these intermediate levels. 2:201/274 was supposed to talk to 2:201/0, which was supposed to talk to 2:0/0. Doesn't scale, so they introduced the 10^n scheme for subdivision (whose precise limits differed between zones)

Thank you - heard about FidoNet before, but wasn't aware of these numbers or what they mean.

I loved how relaying got around long distance charges.

Bowmanville would call Oshawa which was a local call.

Oshawa would call Pickering which was a local call.

Pickering would call Scarborough again a local call.

Scarborough would call Toronto and Toronto would call Mississauga.

All the message relays would just use local calls, but if you left any of the stop out you would need a long distance call. So all our local message did not cost us.

My home BBS was in Shelburne, and every call to a metropolitan centre was long distance for them for quite some time. We used to get long delays on mail drops!

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