A number of people expressed interest in the early days of Pre-net when
FIDO happened. A wonderful example of what people can do together. Here is
I didn't interact much with FIDO, but I remember that I almost was going
to be a fido node once. I had gotten the software and was printing out
the manual - that alone took many hours on my 9 pin dot matrix printer,
ca. 1985 or so :).
I was involved more with PC Board, Uninet (kinda similar, but independent
and even was a moderator for one or two 'conferences' - which were kind
of like Usenet newsgroups) back in about 1988 or so, before I even knew
that the Internet or Usenet existed.
Interestingly enough, I first heard about Linux while lurking around
in PC Board and RIME Unix conferences. Eventually I was trying to do
a mini-newsfeed on my old 386 clunker of RIME/PCBoard stuff, and I started
getting more and more interested in Linux because DOS was just not up
to that task. One thing that got me hooked on Linux early was the disk
access speed - file manipulation and such.
Of course, FIDO is rather horse-n-buggy today, but it was and is a miracle
for the poor.
It's still much like Usenet / UUCP store and forward mechanisms, which I
used up until about 1995. (I basically converted my old 386 clunker that
was spending over an hour just thrashing the disk to an infinitely more
flexible *small* usenet host running Cnews/UUCP, in fact).
John
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