Ehh -- good
question. Why not? I, for one, would be open to any
similar method of communication. FIDO, maybe? :) UUCP is just what
springs to my own mind.
FWIW, I got curious. Everyone has been mentioning FidoNet in the past
tense, and I just did work 2 years ago for a guy who was trying hard to
get me into it. I just looked, and there are 8 active Fido dialups in
Austin.
I never really got into FidoNet for two reasons. The first was
the highly political nature of FidoNet (splitting off, banning
nodes, etc.). The main reason was the Fido spews on Usenet. It
seems like every couple of months some Usenet-FidoNet gateway
would spew a lot of articles back into Usenet with new IDs, so
the messages wouldn't be rejected by the Usenet servers as
duplicates. The FidoNet gateway administrators always acted
like it was Usenet's problem, not theirs, and that they were
doing Usenet a favor by running the gateways, which they weren't.
The gateways were for the benefit of FidoNet, not Usenet. I
finally added code to just dump anything that came through a
FidoNet node, so my server (and those downstream) didn't have
to worry about the spews.
--
Eric Dittman
dittman(a)dittman.net
Check out the DEC Enthusiasts Club at
http://www.dittman.net/