Re: Speaking of BBS's...

["william strutts" <wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com>]

"Paul Schlyter" <pausch@saaf.se> wrote in message
news:9n69ql$g49$1@merope.saaf.se...
> In article <9lvl7.82895$K6.33972144@news2>,
> william strutts <wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com> wrote:
>
> > If I recall, Fidonet was a precursor to Usenet.
>
> No, Usenet really preceded FidoNet.

Well for practical purposes for most non-university users, they
would have encountered Fidonet long before they did Usenet.
Hence the perspective that Fidonet predates Usenet in my case.

> The history of Usenet is longer than most current Usenet users
> realize.  However, during the earlier days of Usenet, comparatively
> few people had access to it.  This had advantages as well as
> disadvantages: the advantage was that Usenet was then almost
> completely free of spam, and the noise level was also very low
> compared to today.  The disadvantage was that access was hard to get
> unless you already were part of some organisation (typically some
> university) with Usenet access.

Not all universities were connected either. In my state - Michigan,
there were only a couple Universities connected to the internet
like University of Michigan and Michigan State U.  I went to smaller
schools which didn't get connected until much later.  I went to
college/university from 1980 to 1987 and never encountered
Usenet or the internet.  Since I was in CS, I did hear about the
ARPANET project which was the foundation of what would
become the internet as we now know it.

> Fidonet was formed by people without Usenet access who wanted
> to be able to communicate globally electronically.

Yes. Mostly local BBS's in the United States  were connected. It was
a pain since you had to wait days for your messages to get posted
globally and to get responses.

> Fidonet is still alive and well.  Check out e.g.:
>
>     http://www.ftsc.org/
>     http://www.webring.org/cgi-bin/webring?ring=fidonet;list
>     http://www.fidonews.org/
>
> Interestingly the tables have now turned: some 10 years ago Fidonet
> news were full of noise while Usenet was fairly noise free.  Today
> most of the noise makers have migrated to Usenet, and Fidonet is run
> by comparatively few enthusiasts -- and today Fidonet is more noise
> free than Usenet.

I have checked out the current Fidonet forums but most of them
appear quite dead and void of messages. Are you sure anyone
still uses them?

--
--
William R. Strutts - wrstrutts1@nospam.home.com - Whatever!

C'est moi!  http://www.facelink.com/wrstrutts

Just hacking away...

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