begin quoting gossamer axe as of Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 11:25:17AM -0700: Stremler wrote: > >Old FIDONET systems often had a feature where you'd reply to everything, > >and then upload all of the responses at once. I knew some folks who > >used this to help eliminate their "stupid posts". > > It was referred to as an "Offline mail reader" (you downloaded QWK packets)
Yup. There were a number of 'em. Some were quite nice. I have my archives somewhere. I need to dig 'em out and put 'em on the Net before they get lost. > and it was used because unlike the internet, time was limited on most BBSs. s/internet/broadband/ My parents are still time-limited, on account of having 20 hours/month for dialup, which is sufficient for 'em download their email, hang up, respond, call back, upload their responses, and hang up again. They don't use their 20 hours/month, most months. > Fidonet had hundreds of message areas and it's impossible to read them, and > respond all in 30 minutes, much less get to the local areas. I know folks who _started_ a BBS just to get around that. :) > My BBS had > mulitple message nets and I pulled in thousands of messages everytime a > message package was delivered. It also made it easier to make a PCR (post > call ratio) in order to play online games. In 24 hours I don't know if I > could have read each and every message that came through on my BBS...and my > BBS was small compared to others in the area. Heh. > Besides why waste the 30 minutes reading messages when you could play LORD! Common high-scores tables to tend to generate a sense of community, don't they? -- _ |\_ "nethack.alt.org is my bane at the moment. Too bad I suck." \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
