FidoNet ....show [was: History [was Re: strangest systems I've sent email from]]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2016 at 10:07:34AM -0700, geneb wrote: [...] Pardon my ignorant question but is there a place on the net where I could read some more about it? Or maybe it is short enough to explain here? And on-topic: I have some memories about reading my email by dialing up special account on my uni (decades ago) with 14.4k ISA modem under DOS, without hardware error correction. Hw e. c. was too costly for me and I naively believed I could get away with cheaper modem. Phone lines in Poland at that time (mid 1990ies) were rather shitty - apart few end users on same pair of wires (or something like this), which reduced available bandwith even more. So I dialed up that account, choose a system to log in and logged in, typed mailx, read quickly quickly quickly. If I was lucky, I could read what I wanted (short mail from fellow student about project progress and the like) before some electric crack sent my modem into stupor. Sometimes it did not disconnect properly and I had to manually pick up a phone to help it. I believe I used... control software that came with modem, if memory serves. It allowed me to actually see a stream coming from the modem. Ugly, some characters mangled. Was meant to dial BBSes. ATDT and off we go. Or on. Later on, my troubles somehow vanished because I learned how to use ppp monopolistic operator (who thus became country wide ISP). Much better. Hangups were very rare even with the same cheap modem, even if bandwith was shared with few neighbors... I disliked them anyway because they charged for every two minutes, no night tariffe, no local tariffe, nothing like this. Linux was a real blessing at that time [1], a natural upgrade path for someone who got a lick of multitasking on Amiga and upgraded to university SunOS workstation (with short episode on VAX, where I used to grab two neighboring terminals to edit on one and compile on another). I used to amuse myself about poor folks working at PC computers, when general Failure prompted them to abort or retry, or if they dared so, to fail. I have also bought me a better modem, external Zoom 56K, but even this one could not perform at maximal speed because of sharing wire, again. Few years later I took revenge on my telecom and switched to ADSL, 256kbps. It is 30Mbps now, after a series of upgrades. Or maybe 60Mbps? I somehow do not care so much anymore... Iso images come down the wire really fast, though. Now, thanks to double NAT (one in my router, one in theirs and third one somewhere nearby, if I read traceroute etc correctly) I do not think about running any services locally. Besides I believe it would have been great PITA and mostly done for showing up, because I do not even have a website (or anything justyfing setting one up). I miss gopher and archie, used them a lot back in days of modem (but not when dialing up, obviously). I also miss internet without javascript and with manually written pages optimized to load fast. A new strange, or normal, way to read stuff is now in terminal emulator, mutt over ssh. Nothing really strange. It was much stranger when I could not ssh (for whatever reason) and had to check mail via webmail. I am a compulsive email reader and use to hoard few thousand a month (around 10 if that interests anybody) - I do not think my computer ever heard so much swearing as during those long moments of waiting for server to show me sorted list of my emails... [1] However, given how things evolve, I somehow wish I tried BSD. I became so entrenched into Linux, that migration is a not so trivial adventure. -- Regards, Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com **